Academic : Literature : English literature

The year after his release from prison in 1897, while in Berneval, France, Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a poem that explored the harsh nature of prison life. It was published anonymously in England under the pseudonym of C33 (Wilde's prison number), and became his last significant work. more...

Price: $4.95

Barbarous Play examines English Renaissance understandings of race as depicted in drama. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and Middleton, Lara Bovilsky offers case studies of how racial meanings are generated by narratives of boundary crossing—especially miscegenation, religious conversion, and class transgression. In the process, she argues that understanding just what is false and figurative in past depictions of race can clarify the illogic of present-day racism. more...

Price: $67.50

The leading contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou has been a lifelong devotee of Beckett's work. This ground-breaking study provides a full introduction to and critique of Badiou's philosophy, politics, ethics and aesthetics, and his interpretation of the Irish writer, as a basis for a major new reading of the Beckett corpus. - ;Beckett and Badiou offers a provocative new reading of Samuel Beckett's work on the basis of a full, critical account of the thought of Alain Badiou. Badiou is the most eminent of contemporary French philosophers. His devotion to Beckett's work has been lifelong. Yet for Badiou philosophy must be integrally affirmative, whilst Beckett apparently commits his art to a work of negation. Beckett and Badiou explores the coherences, contradictions, and extreme. complexities of the intellectual relationship between the two oeuvres. It examines Badiou's philosophy of being, the event, truth, and the subject and the importance of mathematics within his system. It considers the major features of his politics, ethics, and aesthetics and provides an explanation, interpretation, critique,. and radical revision of his work on Beckett. It argues that, once revised, Badiou's version of Beckett offers an extraordinarily powerful tool for understanding his work. Badiou and Beckett are instances of a vestigial or melancholic modernism; that is, in the teeth of a contemporary culture that dreams ever more ambitiously of plenitude, they commit themselves to a rigorous concept of limit and intermittency. Truth and value are occasional and rare. It is seldom that the chance event arrives to disturb the inertia of the world. For Badiou, however, it is the event and its consequences alone that matter. Beckett rather insists on the common experience of. intermittency as destitution. His art is a series of limit-figures, exquisitely subtle and nuanced forms for a world whose state of seemingly rigid paralysis is also always volatile, del more...

Price: $85.00

This title is a study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British 18th century and of the influence of such writers as Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson on his work. It demonstrates how Becket was not only influenced by them but how he interprets them for us in a quite modern way. more...

Price: $125.00

Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but rather as “loopholes” in people's associations. Engaging Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, among others Gil demonstrates how sexuality was conceived as a relationship system not institutionalized in a domestic realm. more...

Price: $66.00