Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature
Author: M. Fludernik
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137404000

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature is the first study to provide transhistorical perspectives and cutting-edge critical analyses of debates concerning idleness in English literature. The topicality of the subject is emphasized by two pieces of sociological analysis.

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature
Author: M. Fludernik
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137404000

Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature is the first study to provide transhistorical perspectives and cutting-edge critical analyses of debates concerning idleness in English literature. The topicality of the subject is emphasized by two pieces of sociological analysis.

Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English

Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English
Author: Andreas H. Jucker
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2020-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027260826

This volume traces the multifaceted concept of manners in the history of English from the late medieval through the early and late modern periods right up to the present day. It focuses in particular on transgressions of manners and norms of behaviour as an analytical tool to shed light on the discourse of polite conduct and styles of writing. The papers collected in this volume adopt both literary and linguistic perspectives. The fictional sources range from medieval romances and Shakespearean plays to eighteenth-century drama, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and present-day television comedy drama. The non-fictional data includes conduct books, medical debates and petitions written by lower class women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The contributions focus in particular on the following questions: What are the social and political ideologies behind rules of etiquette and norms of interaction, and what can we learn from blunders and other transgressions?

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature

Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature
Author: Megan G. Leitch
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 152615109X

Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology

The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology
Author: Charles Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2024-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350362050

Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901

The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850–1901
Author: Heidi Liedke
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-08-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319958615

This book brings together theories of spatiality and mobility with a study of travel writing in the Victorian period to suggest that ‘idleness’ is an important but neglected condition of subjectivity in that era. Contrary to familiar stereotypes of ‘the Victorians’ as characterized by speed, work, and mechanized travel, this books asserts a counter-narrative in which certain writers embraced idleness in travel as a radical means to ‘re-subjectification’ and the assertion of a ‘late-Romantic’ sensibility. Attentive to the historical and literary continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the book reconstructs the Victorian discourse on idleness. It draws on an interdisciplinary range of theorists and brings together a fresh selection of accounts viewed through the lens of cultural studies as well as accounts of publication history and author biography. Travel texts from different genres (by writers such as Anna Mary Howitt, Jerome K. Jerome and George Gissing) are brought together as representing the different facets of the spectrum of idleness in the Victorian context.

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850—1950

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850—1950
Author: Luke Lewin Davies
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2022-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030734323

Shortlisted for the Literary Encyclopedia Book Prize 2022, The Tramp in British Literature, 1850-1950 offers a unique account of the emergence of a new conception of homelessness in the mid-nineteenth century. After arguing that the emergence of the figure of the tramp reflects the evolution of capitalism and disciplinary society in this period, The Tramp in British Literature uncovers a neglected body of "tramp literature" written by memoir and fiction writers, many of whom were themselves homeless. In analysing these works, it presents select texts as a unique and ignored contribution to a wider radical discourse defined by its opposition to a wider societal preoccupation with the need to be productive.

Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640

Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640
Author: Alexandra Hill
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004349200

Lost Books and Printing in London, 1557-1640 is the first attempt to analyse systematically the entries relating to lost books in the Stationers’ Company Register. Books played a fundamental role in early modern society and are key sources for our comprehension of the political, religious, economic and cultural aspects of the age. Over time, the loss of these books has presented a significant barrier to our understanding of the past. The monopoly of the Stationers’ Company centralised book production in England to London with printing jobs carried out by members documented in a Register. Using modern digital approaches to bibliography, Alexandra Hill uses the Register to reclaim knowledge of the English book trade and print culture that would otherwise be lost.

The Travel Writings of Marguerite Blessington

The Travel Writings of Marguerite Blessington
Author: Aneta Lipska
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2017-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1783086793

This book derives from the conviction that Marguerite Blessington (1788–1849) merits scholarly attention as a travel writer, and thus offers the first detailed analysis of Blessington’s four travel books: ‘A Tour in The Isle of Wight, in the Autumn of 1820’ (1822), ‘Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris in 1821’ (1822), ‘The Idler in Italy’ (1839) and ‘The Idler in France’ (1841). It argues that travelling and travel writing provided Blessington with endless opportunities to reshape her public personae, demonstrating that her predilection for self-fashioning was related to the various tendencies in tourism and literature as well as the changing aesthetic and social trends in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism
Author: Russell Goulbourne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-05-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147425067X

Bringing together leading scholars from the USA, UK and Europe, this is the first substantial study of the seminal influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on British Romanticism. Reconsidering Rousseau's connection to canonical Romantic authors such as Wordsworth, Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism also explores his impact on a wide range of literature, including anti-Jacobin fiction, educational works, familiar essays, nature writing and political discourse. Convincingly demonstrating that the relationship between Rousseau's thought and British Romanticism goes beyond mere reception or influence to encompass complex forms of connection, transmission and appropriation, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism is a vital new contribution to scholarly understanding of British Romantic literature and its transnational contexts.