“In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal. The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it […]
When Oscar Wilde said he had “seen wallpaper which must lead a boy brought up under its influence to a life of crime,” his joke played on an idea that […]
The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, […]
This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental […]
Drew Daniel (of the experimental band Matmos) creates—through both his own insights and exclusive interviews with the band—an exploded view of the album’s multiple agendas: a series of close readings […]
Mark Christian Thompson addresses the startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of African […]
Locating John Milton’s works in national and international contexts, and applying a variety of approaches from literary to historical, philosophical, and postcolonial, Milton and Toleration offers a wide-ranging exploration of how Milton’s […]
Modernism is hot again. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, poets and architects, designers and critics, teachers and artists are rediscovering the virtues of the previous century’s most vibrant […]
In The Hammers of Creation, Eric J. Sundquist analyzes the powerful role played by folk culture in three major African-American novels of the early twentieth century: James Weldon Johnson’s The […]
The England of John Milton’s great poems was the England of Dissenters, those who refused to join the state church after the return of monarchy in 1660 and were seen […]