European Studies: English and Irish Studies

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European Studies: English and Irish Studies (41)

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History

The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens

Justin Smith

This compelling book offers a unique perspective on D-Day and its aftermath through the personal testimonies of the Wrens who worked for Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay during Operation Overlord. Drawing on public and private archives, it reveals the untold stories of the women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), balancing their wartime contributions with the strictures of secrecy and censorship. The narrative is framed by letters from these Wrens, which provide intimate glimpses into both the personal and professional challenges they faced during World War II.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Philosophy

Insolubles: Critical Edition with English Translation

Walter Segrave
Barbara Bartocci
Stephen Read

In light of Bradwardine’s criticisms, Walter Segrave, writing around 1330, defended so-called restrictivism (restrictio) by claiming that such paradoxes exhibited a fallacy of accident. The classic example of this fallacy, the first of Aristotle’s fallacies independent of language, is the Hidden Man puzzle: you know Coriscus, Coriscus is the one approaching, but you don’t know the one approaching since, e.g., he is wearing a mask. But Aristotle’s account is unclear and Segrave, building on ideas of Giles of Rome and Walter Burley, shows how the fallacy turns on an equivocation over the supposition of the middle term or one of the extremes in a syllogism. Thereby, Segrave is able to counter Bradwardine’s arguments one by one and defend the restrictivist solution. In this volume, Segrave’s text is edited from the three extant manuscripts, is translated into English, and is preceded by a substantial Introduction.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Material Culture
Visual Arts

Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley

Evanghelia Stead

This insightful study illuminates previously unexplored aspects of Aubrey Beardsley’s relationship to the grotesque and his use of media, particularly his manipulation of the periodical press. For the first time and with keen intelligence, Evanghelia Stead fully reveals the aesthetic importance of Beardsley’s Bon-Mots vignettes, as well as the relationship between Darwinism, his innovative foetus motif, and Decadence itself.

Biography
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Mathematics
Science: History of Science

Augustus De Morgan, Polymath: New Perspectives on his Life and Legacy

Karen Attar
Adrian Rice
Christopher Stray

When Augustus De Morgan died in 1871, he was described as ‘one of the profoundest mathematicians in the United Kingdom’ and even as ‘the greatest of our mathematicians’. But he was far more than just a mathematician. Because much of his voluminous written output on various subjects was scattered throughout journals and encyclopaedias, the breadth of his interests and contributions has been underappreciated by historians. Now, renewed interest in De Morgan’s life and work has coincided with the digitization of his extensive library, revealing the extent to which he pioneered and influenced the development of not merely mathematics but also logic, astronomy, the history of mathematics, education, and bibliography.

Biography
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Trix: The Other Kipling

Barbara Fisher

This volume represents the first biography of Alice MacDonald Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), known as Trix. Rarely portrayed with sympathy or accuracy in biographies of her famous brother Rudyard, Trix was a talented writer and a memorable character in her own right whose fascinating life was unknown until now. In telling Trix’s story, Barbara Fisher rescues her from the misrepresentations, trivializations, and outright neglect of Rudyard’s many biographers.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Saki (H.H. Munro): Original and Uncollected Stories

Bruce Gaston

The short stories of Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, have remained in print continuously for over a hundred years. This collection is the first of its kind to present his stories as they were originally published in newspapers and magazines, preserving their internal consistency and contemporary references lost in revisions for The Chronicles of Clovis and subsequent collected editions. A trove of annotations and carefully sourced bibliographical information illuminates the Edwardian context behind the thirteen selected stories, of which three (‘Mrs. Pendercoet’s Lost Identity’, ‘The Romance of Business’ and ‘The Optimist’) were only recently rediscovered.

Biography
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History
Science: History of Science

Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution

Adrian Desmond

In the 1830s, decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species, a museum of evolution flourished in London. Reign of the Beast pieces together the extraordinary story of this lost working-man's institution and its enigmatic owner, the wine merchant W. D. Saull. A financial backer of the anti-clerical Richard Carlile, the ‘Devil's Chaplain’ Robert Taylor, and socialist Robert Owen, Saull outraged polite society by putting humanity’s ape ancestry on display. He weaponized his museum fossils and empowered artisans with a knowledge of deep geological time that undermined the Creationist base of the Anglican state. His geology museum, called the biggest in Britain, housed over 20,000 fossils, including famous dinosaurs. Saull was indicted for blasphemy and reviled during his lifetime. After his death in 1855, his museum was demolished and he was expunged from the collective memory. Now multi-award-winning author Adrian Desmond undertakes a thorough reading of Home Office spy reports and subversive street prints to re-establish Saull's pivotal place at the intersection of the history of geology, atheism, socialism, and working-class radicalism.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Byron and Trinity: Memorials, Marbles and Ruins

Adrian Poole

This is a collection of reprinted essays about the life and writing of Lord Byron and the themes of ‘memorials, marbles and ruins’ that were prominent in his thinking and feeling.

Biography
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History
Women and Gender Studies

Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London

Leslie Howsam

Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Genetic Inroads into the Art of James Joyce

Hans Walter Gabler

This book is a treasure trove comprising core writings from Hans Walter Gabler‘s seminal work on James Joyce, spanning fifty years from the analysis of composition he undertook towards a critical text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, through the Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, to Gabler‘s latest essays on (appropriately enough) Joyce’s sustained artistic innovation.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

‘Wit’s Wild Dancing Light’: Reading the Poems of Alexander Pope

William Hutchings

The book is a chronological reading of Alexander Pope’s poems, from the Pastorals (1709) to the four-book Dunciad (1743). Each of the 26 chapters forming the volume selects examples for detailed scrutiny, demonstrating how close reading can generate understanding of a whole poem and how critical appraisal can build into a creative survey of an entire poetic career.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature
Literature: Comparative Literature

Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages

Matthew Reynolds
Andrés Claro
Annmarie Drury
Mary Frank
Paola Gaudio
Rebecca Ruth Gould
Jernej Habjan
Yunte Huang
Eugenia Kelbert
Ulrich Timme Kragh
Abhishek Jain
Ida Klitgård
Léa Rychen
Madli Kütt
Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos
Cláudia Pazos-Alonso
Eleni Philippou
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
Céline Sabiron
Kayvan Tahmasebian
Giovanni Pietro Vitali

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than five hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.

European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History
Visual Arts

William Moorcroft, Potter: Individuality by Design

Jonathan Mallinson

William Moorcroft (1872-1945) was one of the most celebrated potters of the early twentieth century. His career extended from the Arts and Crafts movement of the late Victorian age to the Austerity aesthetics of the Second World War. Rejecting mass production and patronised by Royalty, Moorcroft’s work was a synthesis of studio and factory, art and industry. He considered it his vocation to create an everyday art, both functional and decorative, affordable by more than a privileged few: ‘If only the people in the world would concentrate upon making all things beautiful, and if all people concentrated on developing the arts of Peace, what a world it might be,’ he wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1930.

Biography
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Science: History of Science

The Last Man Who Knew Everything: Thomas Young

Andrew Robinson
Martin Rees

No one has given the polymath Thomas Young (1773-1829) the all-round examination he so richly deserves—until now. Celebrated biographer Andrew Robinson portrays a man who solved mystery after mystery in the face of ridicule and rejection, and never sought fame.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life

William F. Halloran

Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover

Patrick J. Keane

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death.

Biography
Education
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Women and Gender Studies

Mary Warnock: Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain

Philip Graham

This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature
Music

Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture

Morag Josephine Grant

In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies

A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt

David Yeandle

'A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt' is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors

Adam Roberts

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader

Nora Bartlett
Jane Stabler

This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 3: 1900-1905

William F. Halloran

Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Health
Women and Gender Studies

Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century

Lucy Pollard

This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garrett, was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers – niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist and campaigner for equal rights for women. Margery Spring Rice continued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years after Marie Stopes founded the first clinic in Britain.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 2: 1895-1899

William F. Halloran

With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf'

Edward Pettit

The image of a giant sword melting stands at the structural and thematic heart of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf. This meticulously researched book investigates the nature and significance of this golden-hilted weapon and its likely relatives within Beowulf and beyond, drawing on the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, liturgy, archaeology, astronomy, folklore and comparative mythology.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Make We Merry More and Less: An Anthology of Medieval English Popular Literature

Douglas Gray
Jane Bliss

This anthology offers a fruitful exploration of the boundary between literary and popular culture, and showcases an impressive breadth of literature, including songs, drama, and ballads. Familiar texts such as the visions of Margery Kempe and the Paston family letters are featured alongside lesser-known works, often oral. This striking diversity extends to the language: the anthology includes Scottish literature and original translations of Latin and French texts.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels

R. H. Winnick

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History
Media Studies and Journalism

A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900

Andrew Hobbs

'A Fleet Street in Every Town' positions the local paper at the centre of debates on Victorian newspapers, periodicals, reading and publishing. It reorientates our view of the Victorian press away from metropolitan high culture and parliamentary politics, and towards the places where most people lived, loved and read. This is an essential book for anybody interested in nineteenth-century print culture, journalism and reading.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: Volume 1: 1855–1894

William F. Halloran

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Yeats's Legacies: Yeats Annual No. 21

Warwick Gould

The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

An Anglo-Norman Reader

Jane Bliss

This book is an anthology with a difference. It presents a distinctive variety of Anglo-Norman works, beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the nineteenth, covering a broad range of genres and writers, introduced in a lively and thought-provoking way. Facing-page translations, into accessible and engaging modern English, are provided throughout, bringing these texts to life for a contemporary audience.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'

Tony Laing

This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son (1848) is ideal for readers who wish to know more about Dickens’s craft and creativity. Drawing on the author’s manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London—and containing hyperlinked facsimiles—Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son offers a new digital transcription with a fresh commentary by Tony Laing. Unique and innovative, this is the only edition to make Dickens’s working methods visible.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature
Literature: Comparative Literature

Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

Michael Bryson
Arpi Movsesian

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Essays in Honour of Eamonn Cantwell: Yeats Annual No. 20

Warwick Gould

This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series. These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot.

American and Latin American Studies
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature
Literature: Comparative Literature

Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict

Martin Paul Eve

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waiver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts

David Atkinson

The first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad addresses topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

Yeats's Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19

Margaret Mills Harper
Warwick Gould

A special issue in this renowned research-level series, Yeats Annual 19 explores the concept of the Mask in Yeats’s plays and poems. The volume also includes studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, and the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. As well as ten new reviews focusing on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS series and his correspondence with George Yeats, this volume republishes the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper from the elusive Yeats Annual 1 (1982).

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature

The Living Stream: Yeats Annual No. 18

Warwick Gould

This special issue of the renowned research-level Yeats Annual offers a tribute to the pioneering Yeats scholar, A. Norman Jeffares. Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, while other scholars offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Raferty’s work of Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, and The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume also includes reviews of recent editions and studies.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
History
History: International Relations

A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture

Anthony Cross

Edited by Anthony Cross, a leading authority on Anglo-Russian relations, this collection demonstrates the scope and variety of Russia’s influence on British culture. Moving from the early 1800s – when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic grappled with the challenge of Pushkin – to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including Crystal Palace and Earls Court, the collection explores British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and Britain’s engagement with Soviet film. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Literature
Theatre

The Theatre of Shelley

Jacqueline Mulhallen

In the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance, Mulhallen provides a meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his ‘closet dramas’ as performable pieces of theatre. As well as discussing Shelley’s stagecraft and analysing performances of his plays from the 1800s to today, the book also offers a detailed account of the theatrical scene of Shelley’s time, including details of the productions Shelley himself saw. Mulhallen reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist.

Biography
European Studies
European Studies: English and Irish Studies
Law
Literature

Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta

Barry Hough
Howard Davis
Lydia Davis

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one quite short period of his life he held real political power – acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. Meticulously researched, this book provides detailed analysis of the laws drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing upon newly discovered archival materials, the authors shed new light on Coleridge’s sense of political and legal morality, showing how Coleridge’s actions whilst in a position of power differed markedly from the idealism he advocated before taking office.