Opening up the field of diasporic Anglo-Arab literature to critical debate, this companion spans from the first Arab novel in 1911 to the resurgence of the Anglo-Arabic novel in the last 20 years. ...There are chapters on authors such as Ameen Rihani, Ahdaf Soueif and Waguih Ghali, and interviews with Laila Lalami, Hisham Matar and Fadia Faqir.
The first book-length study of the oriental tale in England since 1908, Fabulous Orients is an original work of criticism which illustrates the centrality of narratives of and from the eastern ...territories of Turkey, Persia, China, and India in the formation of the novel and constructions of western identity in a culture on the threshold of empire.
England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's ...Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. InThe Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England's rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture.
In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings-tombs, latrines and especially houses-that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the CroxtonPlay of the Sacrament, Marlowe'sThe Jew of Malta,and Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book's epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
By addressing these and other intriguing questions, Kevin Hutchings highlights significant intersections between Green Romanticism and colonial politics, demonstrating how contemporary understandings ...of animality, climate, and habitat informed literary and cross-cultural debates about race, slavery, colonialism, and nature in the British Atlantic world. Revealing an innovative dialogue between British, African, and Native American writers of the Romantic period, this book will be of interest to anyone wishing to consider the interconnected histories of transatlantic colonial relations and environmental thought.
Writing Black Scotland examines race and racism in devolutionary Scottish literature, with a focus on the critical significance of blackness. The book reads blackness in Scottish writing from the ...1970s to the early 2000s, a period of history defined by post-imperial adjustment. Critiquing a unifying Britishness at work in black British criticism, Jackson argues for the importance of black politics in Scottish writing, and for a literary registration of race and racism which signals a necessary negotiation for national Scotland both before and after 1997.
This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the ...fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. As this monograph demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in this technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.
What happens to our understanding of 'orientalism' and imperialism when we consider British-Chinese relations during the nineteenth century, rather than focusing on India, Africa or the Caribbean? ...This book explores China's centrality to British imperial aspirations and literary production, underscoring the heterogeneous, interconnected nature of Britain's formal and informal empire. To British eyes, China promised unlimited economic possibilities, but also posed an ominous threat to global hegemony. Surveying anglophone literary production about China across high and low cultures, as well as across time, space and genres, this book demonstrates how important location was to the production, circulation and reception of received ideas about China and the Chinese. In this account, treaty ports matter more than opium. Ross Forman challenges our preconceptions about British imperialism, reconceptualizes anglophone literary production in the global and local contexts, and excavates the little-known Victorian history so germane to contemporary debates about China's 'rise'.
This book examines writing in English, Irish, and Spanish by women living in Ireland and by Irish women living on the continent between the years 1574 and 1676. This was a tumultuous period of ...political, religious, and linguistic contestation that encompassed the key power‐struggles of early modern Ireland. This study brings to light the ways in which women contributed; they strove to be heard and to make sense of their situations, forging space for their voices in complex ways and engaging with native and new language‐traditions. The book investigates the genres in which women wrote: poetry, nuns' writing, petition‐letters, depositions, biography, and autobiography. It argues for a complex understanding of authorial agency that centres on the act of creating or composing a text, which does not necessarily equate with the physical act of writing. The Irish, English, and European contexts for women's production of texts are identified and assessed. The literary traditions and languages of the different communities living on the island are juxtaposed in order to show how identities were shaped and defined in relation to each other. The book elucidates the social, political, and economic imperatives for women's writing, examines the ways in which women characterized female composition, and describes an extensive range of cross‐cultural, multilingual activity.
Literature played a crucial role in constructing and contesting the modern culture of empire that was fully in place by the start of the Victorian period. Postcolonial criticism's concern with issues ...of geopolitics, race and gender, subalternity and exoticism shape discussions of works by major authors such as Blake, Coleridge, both Shelleys, Austen and Scott, as well as their less familiar contemporaries.
Key Features
Explains how key theoretical concerns of postcolonial studies - its analyses of imaginary geography, the construction of otherness or difference, and cultural hybridity - have dramatically changed our understanding of Romantic literatureProvides accessible yet sophisticated in-depth analyses of selected texts, in a range of genres, whose interpretation is illuminated by postcolonial criticismIncludes a bibliographical essay along with up-to-date bibliography of criticism, editions of primary works, and selected historical materials
Penelope Anderson's original study changes our understanding both of the masculine Renaissance friendship tradition and of the private forms of women's friendship of the eighteenth century and after. ...It uncovers the latent threat of betrayal lurking within politicized classical and humanist friendship, showing its surprising resilience as a model for political obligation undone and remade. Incorporating authors from Cicero to Abraham Cowley and Margaret Cavendish to Mary Astell, the book focuses on two extraordinary women writers, the royalist Katherine Philips and the republican Lucy Hutchinson. And it explores the ways in which they appropriate the friendship tradition in order to address problems of conflicting allegiances in the English Civil Wars and Restoration. As Penelope Anderson suggests, their writings on friendship provide a new account of women's relation to public life, organized through textual exchange rather than bodily reproduction.
