Concise Companions to Literature and Culture

This concise companion examines contexts that are essential to understanding and interpreting writing in English produced in the period between approximately 1100 and 1500. The essays in the book explore ways in which Middle English literature is 'different' from the literature of other periods. The book includes discussion of such issues as the religious and historical background to Middle English literature, the circumstances and milieux in which it was produced, its linguistic features, and the manuscripts in which it has been preserved. Amongst the great range of writers and writings discussed, the book considers the works of the most widely read Middle English author, Chaucer, against the background of the period that he both typifies and subverts. • An accessible resource that examines contexts essential to understanding and interpreting writing of the Middle English period • Chapters explore the distinctiveness of Middle English literature • Brings together discussion and analysis by an international team of Middle English specialists, incorporating fresh material and new insights • Includes analysis of Chaucer's writings, and considers them in relation to the work of his Middle English predecessors, contemporaries and successors • Incorporates discussion of issues steering the perception of Middle English literature in the present day

This volume introduces students to the most important figures, movements and trends in post-war British and Irish poetry. • An historical overview and critical introduction to the poetry published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century • Introduces students to figures including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Andrew Motion • Takes an integrative approach, emphasizing the complex negotiations between the British and Irish poetic traditions, and pulling together competing tendencies and positions • Written by critics from Britain, Ireland, and the United States • Includes suggestions for further reading and a chronology, detailing the most important writers, volumes and events

This concise companion explores the history of psychoanalytic theory and its impact on contemporary literary criticism by tracing its movement across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. • Contains original essays by leading scholars, using a wide range of cultural and historical approaches • Discusses key concepts in psychoanalysis, such as the role of dreaming, psychosexuality, the unconscious, and the figure of the double, while considering questions of gender, race, asylum and international law, queer theory, time, and memory • Spans the fields of psychoanalysis, literature, cultural theory, feminist and gender studies, translation studies, and film. • Provides a timely and pertinent assessment of current psychoanalytic methods while also sketching out future directions for theory and interpretation

Focusing on major and emerging playwrights, institutions, and various theatre practices this “Concise Companion” examines the key issues in British and Irish theatre since 1979. Written by leading international scholars in the field, this collection offers new ways of thinking about the social, political, and cultural contexts within which specific aspects of British and Irish theatre have emerged and explores the relationship between these contexts and the works produced. It investigates why particular issues and practices have emerged as significant in the theatre of this period.

Bringing together a broad range of case studies written by a team of international scholars, this Concise Companion establishes how manuscripts and printed books met the needs of two different approaches to literacy in the early modern period. • Features essays illustrating the particular ways a manuscript and a printed book reflect the different emphases of an elite, private and an egalitarian, public culture, both of which account for the literary achievements of the Renaissance • Includes wide-ranging essays, from printing the Gospels in Arabic to a contemporary reconceptualization of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus • Increases accessibility through a rubric organized around archival and manuscript studies, the provenance of texts and the authority of editions, and studies of genre, religion and literary history • Announces the recovery of archival documents, which in some instances are over four hundred years old • Places translations of Milton's Latin, Greek, and Italian alongside the original texts to increase accessibility for a wide audience of students and scholars • Provides an invaluable platform for highlighting on-going attention to the history of the book and its corollary subjects of reading and writing practices in the 1500s and 1600s.

Taking an innovative and multi-disciplinary approach to literature from 1947 to the present day, this concise companion is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of postcolonial literature and culture. • An indispensable guide for anyone seeking an authoritative understanding of the intellectual contexts of Postcolonialism, bringing together 10 original essays from leading international scholars including C. L. Innes and Susan Bassnett • Explains the ideas and practises that emerged from the dismantling of European empires • Explores the ways in which these ideas and practices influenced the period's keynote concerns, such as race, culture, and identity; literary and cultural translations; and the politics of resistance • Chapters cover the fields of identity studies, orality and literacy, nationalisms, feminism, anthropology and cultural criticism, the politics of rewriting, new geographies, publishing and marketing, translation studies. • Features a useful Chronology of the period, thorough general bibliography, and guides to further reading

“Terror and the Postcolonial” is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. • A groundbreaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts • Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East • Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product • Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware