Events

In eighteenth-century Britain, criminals were routinely whipped, branded, hanged, or transported to America. Only in the last quarter of the century—with the War of American Independence and legal and sociopolitical challenges to capital punishment—did the criminal justice system change, resulting in the reformed prison, or penitentiary, meant to educate, rehabilitate, and spiritualize even hardened felons. This volume is the first to explore the relationship between historical penal reform and Romantic-era literary texts by luminaries such as Godwin, Keats, Byron, and Jane Austen. Read more.

First performed the day after Marie-Antoinette’s beheading, Le Jugement dernier des rois stages the burlesque trial of the remaining kings and queens of Europe—paraded in chains like animals, made to brawl over a barrel of crackers, and finally obliterated by a spectacular volcanic eruption. Such is the shocking context—at once tragic and farcical—of the most infamous play of the French Revolution, familiar to all specialists of the period. Until now, however, no standalone critical edition or English translation of this historic play existed. Read more.

John Banville offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, his Quirke crime novels, and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. Banville’s work has been marked by an embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-consciousness of its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts, in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study asserts that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly-textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels conjure. Read more.

This wide-ranging study of one of the most innovative, daring, and important poetic voices in contemporary Ireland analyzes Mebdh McGuckian’s entire corpus, offering both an original contribution to the field of contemporary Irish literary studies and a readable synthesis of existing criticism that will be useful to academics and students. Read more.