This diverse and wide-ranging collection of thirty-one essays explores the myriad ways in which literary texts are informed by their historical contexts. The essays draw on varied themes and perspectives to present stimulating new readings of both canonical and non-canonical texts and authors.
Author(s): Paul Poplawski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 592
Cover
Review
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Preface, Volume Outline and Rationale
Acknowledgements
Chronology
Introduction
Part I Medieval English, 500–1500
Introductory Note
1 Finding The Dream of the Rood in Old English Literature
Critical Reflections and Further Study
2 The Translator as Author: The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls
Critical Reflections and Further Study
3 Arthurian Romance as a Window on to Medieval Life: The Case of Ywayne and Gawayne and The Awntyrs off Arthure
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part II The Renaissance, 1485–1660
Introductory Note
4 The Renaissance in England: A Meeting Point
Critical Reflections and Further Study
5 ‘Mr Spencer’s Moral Invention’: The Global Horizons of Early Modern Epic
Critical Reflections and Further Study
6 Arden of Faversham
Critical Reflections and Further Study
7 ‘A Little Touch of Harry in the Night’: Mysteries of Kingship and the Stage in Shakespeare’s The Life of King Henry the Fifth
Critical Reflections and Further Study
8 Poems and Contexts: The Case of Henry Vaughan
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part III The Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660–1780
Introductory Note
9 Periodising in Context: The Case of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Critical Reflections and Further Study
10 Truth-Telling and the Representation of the Surinam ‘Indians’ in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
Critical Reflections and Further Study
11 ‘The Pamphlet on the Table’: The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part IV The Romantic Period, 1780–1832
Introductory Note
12 ‘Transported into Asiatic Scenes’: Romanticism and the Orient
Critical Reflections and Further Study
13 Historical Fiction in the Romantic Period: Jane Porter, Walter Scott and the Sublime Hero
Critical Reflections and Further Studies
14 Jane Austen and Her Publishers: Northanger Abbey and the Publishing Context of the Early Nineteenth Century
Critical Reflections and Further Study
15 ‘O for a Life of Sensations’ or ‘the Internal and External Parts’: Keats and Medical Materialism
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part V The Victorian Age, 1832–1901
Introductory Note
16 Poetry and Science in the Victorian Period
Critical Reflections and Further Study
17 ‘In Characters of Tint Indelible’: Life Writing and Legacy in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
Critical Reflections and Further Study
18 Money, Narrative and Representation from Dickens to Gissing
Critical Reflections and Further Study
19 Reading and Remediating Nineteenth-Century Serial Fiction: Closing Down and Opening Up Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla
Critical Reflections and Further Study
20 Public Places, Private Spaces in Fin-de-Siècle British Women’s Writing
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part VI The Twentieth Century, 1901–1939
Introductory Note
21 D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love: An Anthropological Reading
Critical Reflections and Further Study
22 The Epigraph for T. S. Eliot’s Marina: Classical Tradition and the Modern Era
Critical Reflections and Further Study
23 Passing as a Male Critic: Mary Beton’s Coming of Age in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part VII The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 1939–2020
Introductory Note
24 An Ecocritical Reading of the Poetry of Ted Hughes
Critical Reflections and Further Study
25 Women Publishers in the Twenty-First Century: Assessing Their Impact on New Writing – and Writers
Critical Reflections and Further Study
26 Crisis and Community in Contemporary British Theatre
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Part VIII Postcolonial Literature in English
Introductory Note
27 Complexities and Concealments of Eros in the African Novel: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Critical Reflections and Further Study
28 Bessie Head’s Feminism of Everyday Life
Critical Reflections and Further Study
29 The Gender Politics of Grace Nichols: Joy and Resistance
Critical Reflections and Further Study
30 ‘The All-purpose Quote’: Salman Rushdie’s Metacontextuality
Critical Reflections and Further Study
31 Postcolonial Literature and the World, 2017–2019: Contemporary Complexities
Critical Reflections and Further Study
Appendices
Appendix A: Glossary of Critical Terms
Appendix B: Study Guide: Learning from the Essays
Appendix C: Essays Listed by Genre and Theme
Index
