Bøger udgivet af Liverpool University Press

Franz Kafka's work has profoundly influenced postmodernist thinking. Michael Wood pays close attention to individual works by Kafka and to his original Austro-Hungarian context.

This study offers a fresh introduction to the achievement of Henry Fielding (1707-1754) as dramatist, journalist and novelist. In his day Fielding was always a centre of controversy, attacked as 'immoral', yet praised for his 'realistic' portrayal of contemporary society and his attack on hypocrisy and exploitation. Jenny Uglow sets Fielding in the light of recent critical debates and places him in the context of his age; identifying central ideas on judgement, mercy and benevolence, tracing thedevelopment of his craft and clarifying his ideas on comedy and the role of the novel, particularly his rivalry with Samuel Richardson. Readings of key works - Tom Jones, Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Jonathan Wild and Amelia - are enriched by studies of his drama and of lesser known works such as A Journey from this World to the Next, and by reference to Fielding's essays, journalism, politics and work as a pioneering magistrate in London. Fielding emerges as a writer of startling originality, constantly adapting traditional forms to new ends, whose fiercely ironic analysis of gender, power and language is combined with a comedy at once critical and humane.

Tolkien was a specialist in a recherché field. He did not, at least initially, write for a mass audience. Yet for many in the 60s his books, particularly Lord of the Rings, became a political badge and an interpretative text. Widely translated, his fiction won the accolade both of parody and of its own learned journal; rock bands took names from his characters; and "Tolkien" - or how he was read - demonstrably affected modern fantasy, in writing, film, video- and board-game. This book explores how his work came to be so diversely received. Dr Moseley's critical discussion examines Tolkien's view of fiction as "sub-creation", exploring his analysis of mythopoeia and of the status of art and literature in relation to his own practice. It is argued that in the critical concerns of Tolkien and his circle lie the key to important issues in his fiction. His use of linguistic game and literary pastiche is explored without obscuring his emotional commitment to the making of myths that expressed some of his deepest fears of the world he experienced.

Edmund Spenser (1554-1599) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calendar (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-96) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixteenth century. Readers have always been immediately attracted by the fluid grace of is language, and by the magical world of dwarfs, hermits, knights and dragons evoked in The Faerie Queene, but have often been bewildered and overawed by the bulk and complexity of his writing. In this approachable and informative book, Colin Burrow clarifies the genres and conventions of work in Spenser's poem. He explores the poet's taste for archaism and allegory, and the native of epic and of heroism in The Faerie Queene. He presents Spenser as a 'Renaissance' poet, who is drawn at once to images of vital rebirth and to images of mortal frailty. In clear, jargon-free prose he explores Spenser's equivocal relationship with his Queen and with the Irish landscape in which he spent his mature years. Spenser emerges from this book a less orthodox and harmonious poet that he is often thought to be, but as a complex, thoughtful and attractive writer.

Dr Davies' stimulating study covers the full range of Donne's poetry, from the early satires and elegies to the Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems, and includes thoughtful analysis of parts of his memorable sermons. Questioning the traditional critical approach which relates the writer's life and work, she emphasises instead the Renaissance scepticism which brought all belief - including the concept of the "self" - into doubt. Close, sensitive readings of individual poems, which make room for personal reactions to their profound emotion, are balanced by a wider exploration of the cultural, religious and political context conditioning the poet's mind. Raising a feminist challenge to the "virility" of his writing, Davies exposes the poet's misogyny and the emotional conflict and vulnerability which it reveals. This powerful book will offer new directions for the study of Donne's turbulent and brilliant intelligence.

Barbara Hardy has concentrated on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, The Jolly Corner and other tales, autobiography, travel and the influential criticism. She has been writing about James since the fifties and draws on long experience of teaching James - to addicts, hostile parodists, and persevering fiction-lovers fascinated by a demandingly extravagant and original novelist. She offers new readings of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James's theory and practice anticipate. Her close analysis traces generative imaging-making and reflexive story-telling, following two dominant and complementary themes, the social construction of character, and creative imagination: James dramatises the power of environment, to dismiss essentialism and ask the key question 'What shall we call the self?'; and he is a disturbing analyst of inner life, catching its fantasies, revisions, and speculations in self-referential language. This study of the most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists will interest new and old Jamesians, novel-readers and students at all levels.

George Farquhar (1677-1707) was the last of the Restoration dramatists. He achieved early success with The Constant Couple. In his final plays, The Recruiting Officer and The Beaux' Stratagem, he developed a new type of character, more human and attractive than most creations in Restoration comedy. In this 1966 study, A. J. Farmer argues that it is Farquhar's highly individual personality, 'with its never-failing gaiety and verve' which merits him 'a place to himself [...] among the brilliant company of Restoration playwrights'. A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

Thomas Kyd (c.1558-1594) was one of the most important figures in the development of Elizabethan drama. In this 1966 study, Philip Edwards explores Kyd's work in the context of Early Elizabethan Tragedy, arguing that The Spanish Tragedy is "more original, and greater, than Richard III". A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

In this 1966 study, Patrick Cruttwell explores the history and the execution of the Sonnet form in English Literature. The illustrative poems are necessarily drawn from a wide range of writers: from Thomas Wyatt to W. H. Auden, through Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, two Rossettis, Meredith and Hopkins -- among others. A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

It is a paradox that telling stories must be one of mankind's most ancient activities, yet the writing of short prose stories is a comparatively modern art. In his first essay, Mr Beachcroft considers the English short story historically, showing the various treatments and forms that gradually move towards the modern short story. In doing this he has an eye for certain enduring moods and themes which offer comparison and contrast with the work of modern writers. The essay traces the short story or the forms that correspond to it from ancient and mediaeval times through the Elizabethan collections and the essay writers of the eighteenth century until the short story begins to take a more modern shape in the nineteenth century. The great Victorian masters of fiction were primarily the authors of long novels, but they in turn added to the form. It is when we reach the earliest work of Robert Louis Stevenson that we see a new unity of image and event that brings us to the modern short story. Mr Beachcroft will consider in detail the work of the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century writers in a second and final essay. Mr Beachcroft is known especially for his own short stories which have been included in many anthologies since the nineteen twenties. He was the first General Editor of the series Writers and Their Work.

Art, Crime and Madness explores the relationship between creative innovation, deviance and morbidity. To innovate, one has to be able to view the medium and the object of creativity in a different, hitherto unexplored manner. The essence of art is creative innovation, coupled with an ability, in varying degrees, to transcend the boundaries of consciousness. But this 'ability' is also the prerogative of the mentally deranged. Likewise, the criminal and the deviant are more likely to transcend normative barriers while creating, hence the wide range of criminal and deviant behaviour in society. Although the inverse hypothesis does not hold -- the mere existence of deviance or morbidity does not predispose the individual to creativity -- nevertheless criminal and mad behaviour are often very innovative. This thesis is illustrated by historical case histories of creative deviance and genius madness, and contemporary observations. The painter Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio killed a man while still a teenager, and a second victim during a ball game. In his lifetime he was considered degenerate, but today he is considered the greatest painter of the Italian Settecento, and his portrait adorns the Hundred-Thousand Lira note. Jean Genet the homosexual thief was born out of wedlock and as a teenager he transgressed almost all the paragraphs of the French criminal code. But he became a famous French playwright, the mouthpiece for criminals and deviants. His plays built up a philosophical apology for the raison d'etre of the criminal group.

Dorothy Sherman Severin, who retired in 2008 from the Gilmour Chair of Spanish at the University of Liverpool, is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of the Late Medieval literature of Spain, with particular expertise in the study of Celestina and of the Cancioneros. In this volume, nineteen of her academic admirers have contributed original chapters in her honour, mostly on these same topics, under the editorship of the Hispanist Joseph T. Snow and Professor Severin's Liverpool colleague Roger Wright. The contributors are: Rafael Beltran, Patrizia Botta, Alan Deyermond, Louise Haywood, Eukene Lacarra, Jeremy Lawrance, Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Manuel Moreno, Carmen Parrilla, David Pattison, Regula Rohland de Langbehn, Joseph T. Snow, Barry Taylor, Lesley Twomey, Mercedes Vaquero, Louise Vasvári, Julian Weiss, Jane Whetnall and Roger Wright.

The Boke of Gostely Grace is a Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241-1298), a Benedictine/Cistercian nun at the convent of Helfta. This new Companion will add momentum to the current interdisciplinary and theoretical debate surrounding Latin texts and their translations into the vernacular, including a number of issues regarding women's literary culture. It complements and supplements the new critical edition of the text, The Boke of Gostely Grace, edited by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and Anne Mouron with Mark Atherton, published by Liverpool University Press in 2022.A comprehensive introduction is followed by three parts. Part 1 examines vernacular translations of the Liber specialis gratiae from the late medieval and early modern periods in German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian and French. Part 2 explores a wide-range of critical issues in The Boke of Gostely Grace, and in particular aspects of the spirituality of Helfta. The volume concludes in Part 3 with aspects of the Last Things at Helfta, more specifically purgatorial piety and the theme of the dying and the dead. The volume as a whole provides a new and nuanced understanding of how the mystical literary output of Helfta circulated and was received in the late medieval literary culture of England and Europe.

Empresses-in-Waiting comprises case studies of late antique empresses, female members of imperial dynasties, and female members of the highest nobility of the late Roman empire, ranging from the fourth to the seventh centuries AD. Situated in the context of the broader developments of scholarship on late antique and byzantine empresses, this volume explores the political agency, religious authority, and influence of imperial and near-imperial women within the Late Roman imperial court, which is understood as a complex spatial, social, and cultural system, the centre of patronage networks, and an arena for elite competition. The studies explore female performance and representation in literary and visual media as well as in court ceremonial, and discuss the opportunities and constraints of female power within a male dominated court environment and the broader realms of imperial activity. By focusing on imperial women, the volume not only addresses questions of gendered rhetoric and agency but throws into relief general dynamics in the exercise of imperial power during a period in which the classical Mediterranean world at large, as well as the Roman monarchy, underwent crucial transformations.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Since the 1950s, film production in Ireland has evolved into a mature industry creating high-profile film, television drama, documentary and animation for both the domestic and international markets. This book traces that evolution through a history of the screen production industries on the island of Ireland. More specifically, the book is concerned with the people who work in these industries - how they have shaped the work they do and the conditions under which that work is carried out. The book therefore highlights the vital contribution of film and television workers to screen policy and labour relations in Ireland, north and south.The book presents a local history that explicates the development of the screen industries in Ireland and their relationship to the global Hollywood production system. While the emphasis is on film and television workers, the book acknowledges the essential producer contribution to building the industry as it exists today. However it also emphasises producer obligations towards the screen workers they employ. The result is a local history of Irish screen production told mainly from a labour perspective, using previously unused records from the trade union archives and other labour history sources.

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.Female agency in the ancient world has long been implicitly, and on a few occasions explicitly, examined in classical scholarship, but few of these studies begin with a unified theoretical framework or set of approaches (with some notable exceptions). Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World departs from these important studies by beginning with a definition of the aforementioned concept of 'female agency' that acknowledges that all social agents, female and otherwise, were and are relational and multidimensional beings, and that agency was and is relational. This volume's conceptual points of departure allow contributors to consider women as social agents in ancient cultures and as relationally embedded and integrated in various cultural systems, even under conditions of oppression, by providing contextualised examples of women acting on their varying degrees of agency.Contributions are organised broadly chronologically in order to trace the breadth and shifting patterns of female agency throughout the ancient Mediterranean world from the 7th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Case studies include Katherine McDonald on the dynamics of female agency in pre-Roman through a close examination of the epigraphic record; Karolina Frank on women's oracular inquiries at Dodona and Brenda Longfellow on how Pompeian women, through their funerary inscriptions, can show, from different angles, the needs, desires, and agency of women from a range of social circumstances.

Performative Pasts rethinks concepts of transnational memory from a gendered perspective in relation to French-language narratives from Algeria and France since 1962. The book's focus on 'performativity' links theoretical perspectives on gender to the 'performative turn' in memory studies. This approach provides new readings of French-language works of literature, film, and theatre by five writers (some canonical, others overlooked): Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Ahmed Kalouaz, Malika Mokeddem, and Nina Bouraoui. The book reappraises both the 'connective' representation of disparate pasts and the reproduction of gendered imaginaries in the present.

Runner-up for the book award in the 1994 British Archaeological Awards, Timber Castles is the standard work on the subject and hugely influential in its field. Its reissue makes available again this much sought after text with a new preface by Robert Higham. Some of the greatest medieval castles survive only as earthworks and in pictures and written accounts . . . because they were made of timber. Robert Higham and Philip Barker, who excavated in detail the timber castle at Hen Domen in Wales, have brought together evidence of all kinds to produce the first comprehensive survey of this neglected and little-known type of fortification.

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism continues to be one of the most influential texts in the sociology of modern Western societies. Although Weber never produced the further essays with which he intended to extend the study, he did complete four lengthy Replies to reviews of the text by two German historians. Written between 1907 and 1910, the Replies offer a fascinating insight into Weber's intentions in the original study, and the present volume is the first complete translation of all four Replies in English.

Through an examination of fourth to sixth century sermons, letters, laws, and treatises in Latin-speaking communities, the difficulties of late antique clerics in moving ascetically influenced sexual ideals into wider practice become evident.

Roni Weinstein's sociological reading of the kabbalistic ideas of the early modern period suggests that they gained acceptance because they met the needs of contemporary Jewish society. Although these ideas were presented as continuing a tradition, their goal was reformation: few aspects of Jewish life were not changed in consequence. This broadly based and innovative study challenges accepted ideas on the origins of Jewish modernity, and also shows how Counter-Reformation Catholicism affected these developments.

The Zohar is one of the most sacred, authoritative, and influential books in Jewish culture. Many scholarly works have been dedicated to its ideas, its literary style, and the question of its authorship. This book focuses on other issues: it examines the various ways in which the Zohar has been received by its readers and the impact it has had on Jewish culture, including the fluctuations in its status and value and the different cultural practices linked to these changes. This dynamic and multi-layered history throws important new light on many aspects of Jewish cultural history over the last seven centuries. Boaz Huss has broken new ground with this study, which examines the reception and canonization of the Zohar as well as its criticism and rejection from its inception to the present day. His underlying assumption is that the different values attributed to the Zohar are not inherent qualities of the zoharic texts, but rather represent the way it has been perceived by its readers in different cultural contexts. He therefore considers the attribution of different qualities to the Zohar through time, and the people who were engaged in attributing such qualities and making innovations in cultural practices and rituals. For each historical period from the beginning of Zohar reception to the present, Huss considers the social conditions that stimulated the veneration of the Zohar as well as the factors that contributed to its rejection, alongside the cultural functions and consequences of each approach. Because the multiple modes of the reception of the Zohar have had a decisive influence on the history of Jewish culture, this highly innovative and wide-ranging approach to Zohar scholarship will have important repercussions for many areas of Jewish studies.

Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of eastern Europe. This wide-ranging survey of sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, and many other languages fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe while also shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture and on cross-cultural contacts between Jews and their neighbours.

The Journal of Beatles Studies is the first journal to establish The Beatles as an object of academic research, and will publish original, rigorously researched essays, notes, as well as book and media reviews. The journal aims are;

Thirteen essays providing new perspectives on medieval and early modern recipes - short instructional texts on a variety of topics including medicine and cooking. Recipes survive in large numbers in manuscripts, and can not only reveal information about what's in the recipes themselves, but also literary practices, book materiality, and society in general.

During the Enlightenment, people from the middling sort organised themselves into 56 patriotic societies in Denmark, Norway, and the German duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.

This book argues that one of the most striking aspects of Kim Stanley Robinson's fiction is his concern with literary apprenticeship. Engaging with a sub-set of his novels concerned with the composition of a narrative account, this book reads Robinson's fiction as addressing problems bound to narrative, examining its structures, limits, possibilities, and value.

This beautifully illustrated book shines new light on this most famous of ancient monuments, and is the first in-depth study of archaeology and astronomy at Stonehenge for both researchers and the public alike. A very important contribution to the field, it is a book that should be widely read.