The Shakespearean novel is undergoing a renaissance as the long prose narrative form becomes reinvigorated through new forms of media such as television, film, and the internet. Shakespeare and the Modern Novel explores the history of the novel as a literary form, suggesting that the form can trace its strongest roots beyond the eighteenth-century work of Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson to Shakespeare’s plays. Within this collection, well-established Shakespeare critics demonstrate that the diversity and flexibility of interactions between Shakespeare and the modern novel are very much alive.

"This study presents a new approach to the theory of Romanticism. Peer proceeds through key Romantic documents about form and structure, while displacing and condensing modern scholarly assumptions that interrupt modern theoretical protocol. A line of development is suggested, moving from eighteenth-century explorations in Kant, Fielding, and Diderot, through Schlegelian Romantic beginnings, and on through Emily Bronte, Pushkin, and the Romantic Manifesto, culminating in the profound achievement of Manzoni. Summarizing narrative implications by looking at the modern discipline of Comparative Literature, this book deliberately deforms both our contemporary ideas about Romanticism as well as our non-Romantic way of teaching it."--BOOK JACKET.

Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos: Person, Audience, Language breaks new ground in providing a sustained, demystifying treatment of its subject and looking for answers to basic questions regarding the creation, experience, aesthetics and philosophy of Shakespearean sublimity. More specifically, it explores how Shakespeare generates experiences of sublime pathos, for which audiences have been prepared by the sublime ethos described in the companion volume, Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos. To do so, it examines Shakespeare’s model of mutualistic character, in which "entangled" language brokers a psychic communion between fictive persons and real-life audiences and readers. In the process, Sublime Critical platitudes regarding Shakespeare’s liberating ambiguity and invention of the human are challenged, while the sympathetic imagination is reinstated as the linchpin of the playwright’s sublime effects. As the argument develops, the Shakespearean sublime emerges as an emotional state of vulnerable exhilaration leading to an ethically uplifting openness towards others and an epistemologically bracing awareness of human unknowability. Taken together, Shakespeare’s Sublime Pathos and Shakespeare’s Sublime Ethos show how Shakespearean drama integrates matter and spirit on hierarchical planes of cognition and argue that, ultimately, his is an immanent sublimity of the here-and-now enfolding a transcendence which may be imagined, simulated or evoked, but never achieved.

Although best known the world over for his masterpiece novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, the antics of the would-be knight-errant and his simple squire only represent a fraction of the trials and tribulations, both in the literary world and in society at large, of this complex man. Poet, playwright, soldier, slave, satirist, novelist, political commentator, and literary outsider, Cervantes achieved a minor miracle by becoming one of the rarest of things in the Early-Modern world of letters: an international best-seller during his lifetime, with his great novel being translated into multiple languages before his death in 1616. The principal objective of The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes is to create a resource in English that provides a fully comprehensive overview of the life, works, and influences of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). This volume contains seven sections, exploring in depth Cervantes's life and how the trials, tribulations, and hardships endured influenced his writing. Cervantistas from numerous countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and France offer their expertise with the most up-to-date research and interpretations to complete this wide-ranging, but detailed, compendium of a writer not known for much other than his famous novel outside of the Spanish-speaking world. Here we explore his famous novelDon Quixote de la Mancha, his other prose works, his theatrical output, his poetry, his sources, influences, and contemporaries, and finally reception of his works over the last four hundred years.

The Early Romantics met resistance from artists and academics alike in part because they defied the conventional wisdom that philosophy and the arts must be kept separate. Indeed, as the literary component of Romanticism has been studied and celebrated in recent years, its philosophical aspect has receded from view. This book, by one of the most respected scholars of the Romantic era, offers an explanation of Romanticism that not only restores but enhances understanding of the movement's origins, development, aims, and accomplishments--and of its continuing relevance. Poetry is in fact the general ideal of the Romantics, Frederick Beiser tells us, but only if poetry is understood not just narrowly as poems but more broadly as things made by humans. Seen in this way, poetry becomes a revolutionary ideal that demanded--and still demands--that we transform not only literature and criticism but all the arts and sciences, that we break down the barriers between art and life, so that the world itself becomes "romanticized." Romanticism, in the view Beiser opens to us, does not conform to the contemporary division of labor in our universities and colleges; it requires a multifaceted approach of just the sort outlined in this book. Table of Contents: Preface Introduction: Romanticism Now and Then 1. The Meaning of "Romantic Poetry" 2. Early German Romanticism: A. Characteristic 3. Early Romanticism and the Aufklärung 4. FrÃ1⁄4hromantik and Platonic Tradition 5. The Sovereignty of Art 6. The Concept of Bildung Early German Romanticism 7. Friedrich Schlegel: The Mysterious Romantic 8. The Paradox of Romantic Metaphysics 9. Kant and the Naturphilosophen 10. Religion and Politics in FrÃ1⁄4hromantik Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index This is an excellent book. Its ten chapters are much more accessible and often clearer than the larger classic tomes on the subject. Each takes up a very significant topic and is sure to be read with profit by a wide range of readers - whether they are new to the field or already quite familiar with it. The book concerns an era, Early German Romanticism, that is properly becoming a major focus of new research. This volume could become one of the most helpful steps in making the area part of the canon for Anglophone scholars in all fields today. It is surely one of the best remedies for correcting out of date images of the work of the German romantics as regressive, obscurantist, or irrelevant. Early German Romanticism extends and modifies the project of the Enlightenment. The author shows that it deserves our attention not only because it is an era represented by some of the most interesting and creative personalities in our cultural history, but also because its main line of thought is responsible for a way of thinking central to our own time, namely a naturalism that might be expansive enough to do justice to traditional interests in the unique value of human freedom. --Karl Ameriks, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame This book is a very fine and erudite study. It is impressively wide-ranging: literature, metaphysics, political philosophy, science, ethics, and religion all come seriously into play. It almost functions as an introduction to Early German Romanticism at a very high though not forbidding level. --Ian Balfour, Professor of English, York University

The role of translation in the formation of modern Japanese identities has become one of the most exciting new fields of inquiry in Japanese studies. This book marks the first attempt to establish the contours of this new field, bringing together seminal works of Japanese scholarship and criticism with cutting-edge English-language scholarship. Collectively, the contributors to this book address two critical questions: 1) how does the conception of modern Japan as a culture of translation affect our understanding of Japanese modernity and its relation to the East/West divide? and 2) how does the example of a distinctly East Asian tradition of translation affect our understanding of translation itself? The chapter engage a wide array of disciplines, perspectives, and topics from politics to culture, the written language to visual culture, scientific discourse to children's literature and the Japanese conception of a national literature. Translation in Modern Japan will be of huge interest to a diverse readership in both Japanese studies and translation studies as well as students and scholars of the theory and practice of Japanese literary translation, traditional and modern Japanese history and culture, and Japanese women’s studies.

Much recent contemporary fiction by women has appropriated and adapted themes and plot structures found in Shakespearean drama. This is an innovative study of these texts. It considers novels by authors set in locations covering the globe.

Reading the Renaissance, first published in 1996, is a collection of essays discussing the literature, drama, poetics and culture of the Renaissance period. The Renaissance, which extends from about 1300 to 1700 depending on the country, was originally a rebirth of the arts but has also come to apply to the wider cultural change in the face of modernization. The essays represent a plural Renaissance and explore the boundaries between genre and gender, languages and literatures, reading and criticism, the Renaissance and the medieval, the early modern and the postmodern, world and theatre. There is also a plurality of methods that is fitting for the variety of topics and the richness of the Renaissance. This book is ideal for students of literature and theatre studies.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.