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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2023

        Suicide and the Gothic

        by William Hughes, Andrew Smith

        Suicide and the Gothic is the first protracted study of how the act of self-destruction recurs and functions within one of the most enduring and popular forms of fiction. Comprising eleven original essays and an authoritative introduction, this collection explores how the act of suicide has been portrayed, interrogated and pathologised from the eighteenth century to the present. The featured fictions embrace both canonical and the less-studied texts and examine the crisis of suicide - a crisis that has personal, familial, religious, legal and medical implications - in European, American and Asian contexts. Featuring detailed interventions into the understanding of texts as temporally distant as Thomas Percy's Reliques and Patricia Highsmith's crime fictions, and movements as diverse as Wertherism, Romanticism and fin-de-siècle decadence, Suicide and the Gothic provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of this recurrent crisis in fiction and culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2021

        Medieval film

        by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer

        Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in inexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval Film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Medieval film

        by Anke Bernau, Bettina Bildhauer

        Medieval film explores theoretical questions about the ideological, artistic, emotional and financial investments inhering in cinematic renditions of the medieval period. What does it mean to create and watch a 'medieval film'? What is a medieval film and why are they successful? This is the first work that attempts to answer these questions, drawing, for instance, on film theory, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and the growing body of work on medievalism. Contributors investigate British, German, Italian, Australian, French, Swedish and American film, exploring topics such translation, temporality, film noir, framing and period film - and find the medieval lurking in unexpected corners. In addition it provides in-depth studies of individual films from different countries including The Birth of a Nation to Nosferatu, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Medieval film will be of interest to medievalists working in disciplines including literature, history, art history, to scholars working on film and in cultural studies. It will also be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and to an informed enthusiast in film or/and medieval culture.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        May 2024

        Medieval afterlives

        Transforming traditions in Shakespeare and early English drama

        by Daisy Black, Katharine Goodland

        A collection of essays which show how early drama traditions were transformed, recycled, re-used and reformed across time to form new relationships with their audiences. Medieval afterlives brings new insight to the ways in which peoples in the sixteenth century understood, manipulated and responded to the history of their performance spaces, stage technologies, characterisation and popular dramatic tropes. In doing so, this volume advocates for a new understanding of sixteenth-seventeenth century theatre makers as highly aware of the medieval traditions that formed their performance practices, and audiences who recognised and appreciated the recycling of these practices between plays.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2023

        Medieval women and urban justice

        Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300–1500

        by Teresa Phipps

        This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns - Nottingham, Chester and Winchester - and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2025

        Ghosts and the Gothic

        by Ruth Heholt, Joanne Ella Parsons

        Ghosts have long been connected with the Gothic, but until now there has not been a book dedicated to the subject. This collection examines ghostly presences (and absences) in both classic and lesser-known Gothic texts from the beginning of the genre to the present in a global context. Arguing that the undead, in the form of ghosts, are intrinsic to the Gothic mode, essays in the collection question the place of manifested spirits. The Gothic has always been 'political', and essays in this collection examine some of the most relevant issues facing us today: from the destruction of the natural environment, to questions of 'freedom', to gender politics.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2017

        Gothic forms of feminine fictions

        by Susanne Becker

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        November 2025

        Serfdom in medieval England

        Theory and practice 1200 to 1500

        by Mark Bailey

        Serfdom was a coercive relationship between a landowner and peasant, which was widespread across medieval and early modern Europe. Itfeatures prominently in major historical debates, such as the origins of capitalism and the divergent pathways of western and eastern Europe to modernity. Scholars have paid particular attention to English serfdom, which is usually portrayed as highly oppressive and a major cause of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. This comprehensive survey draws on a vast scholarship and new research to show how, in reality, English serfdom was weak, casting new light on the nature of its society and economy when the Black Death struck in 1348-9. The pandemicnow assumesa central role in the rapid decline of serfdom, as illustrated in a case study of the estate of one of England's harshest landowners, St Albans abbey.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Gothic television

        by Helen Wheatley

        Gothic television is the first full length study of the Gothic released on British and US television. An historical account, the book combines detailed archival research with analyses of key programmes, from Mystery and Imagination and Dark Shadows, to The Woman in White and Twin Peaks, and uncovers an aspect of television drama history which has, until now, remained critically unexplored. While some have seen television as too literal or homely a medium to successfully present Gothic fictions, Gothic television argues that the genre, in its many guises, is, and has always been, well-suited to television as a domestic medium, given the genre's obsessions with haunted houses and troubled families. This book will be of interest to lecturers and students across a number of disciplines including television studies, Gothic studies, and adaptation studies, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the Gothic, and in the history of television drama.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2023

        The gift of narrative in medieval England

        by Nicholas Perkins

        This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        September 2025

        Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance

        Typologies of violence and desire

        by Hope Doherty-Harrison

        Love and anti-Judaism is a new examination of medieval romance for the questions it poses of the most significant events in Christian history. Providing new readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther and Sir Amadace, the book argues that romance explores depictions of love-and the sacrifices it may necessitate-in the Hebrew Bible, especially where they do not easily fit into interpretations asserting that this history must prefigure Christ and the crucifixion. An examination of anti-Judaism as a discourse of violence and desire that could be turned inwardly to expose the irresolution in Christianity, this book will provoke new investigations into the religious crises of medieval romance.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2020

        Medieval women and urban justice

        by Teresa Phipps, Cordelia Beattie

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        March 2023

        Transplantation Gothic

        by Sara Wasson

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        January 2013

        Popular protest in late-medieval Europe

        Italy, France and Flanders

        by Samuel Kline Cohn

        The documents in this stimulating volume span from 1245 to 1424 but focus on the 'contagion of rebellion' from 1355 to 1382 that followed in the wake of the plague. They comprise a diversity of sources and cover a variety of forms of popular protest in different social, political and economic settings. Their authors range across a wide political and intellectual horizon and include revolutionaries, the artistocracy, merchants and representatives from the church. They tell gripping and often gruesome stories of personal and collective violence, anguish, anger, terror, bravery, and foolishness. Of over 200 documents presented here, most have been translated into English for the first time, providing students and scholars with a new opportunity to compare social movements across Europe over two centuries, allowing a re-evaluation of pre-industrial revolts, the Black Death and its consequences for political culture and action. This book will be essential reading for those seeking to better understand popular attitudes and protest in medieval Europe.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2025

        Strange matter

        Medieval disruptions of time

        by Martin Bleisteiner, Jan-Peer Hartmann, Andrew James Johnston

        Medieval and early modern texts reflect a fascination with material objects, from ancient heirlooms to ingenious automata. Often imbued with power or beauty, these objects carry an uncanny sense of otherness, their mysterious origins evoking wonder and suggesting temporal and spatial distance. Acting as repositories of temporal alterity, such artefacts bridge the past and present in profound ways. This volume, featuring contributions from experts in literature and art history, explores how texts from these periods use material objects to engage with temporal otherness. From everyday items to marvellous creations, objects challenge distinctions between human and material, natural and cultural. Whether examining the hybrid status of Hector's body in Lydgate's Troy Book or the temporal agency of humble bubbles, the chapters illuminate the vibrant networks connecting people and objects. By highlighting the 'hybridity' of matter, the book offers fresh insights into Bruno Latour's critique of nature-culture divides.

      • Trusted Partner
      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        June 2017

        European Gothic

        by Avril Horner

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