The European dimension of research in the humanities has come into sharp focus over recent years, producing scholarship which ranges across disciplines and national boundaries. Until now there has been no major channel for such work. This series aims to provide one, and to unite the fields of cultural studies and traditional scholarship. It will publish the most exciting new writing in areas such as European history and literature, art history, archaeology, language and translation studies, political, cultural and gay studies, music, psychology, sociology and philosophy. The emphasis will be explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity of cultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues of cultural transition.
By Maria C. Scott
June 07, 2019
Maria Scott's study of the operation of irony in Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris contends that the principal target of the collection's spleen is its own readership. Baudelaire, as one of the most perceptive cultural commentators of the nineteenth century, was naturally very keenly aware of the ...
By Liz Oakley-Brown
June 07, 2019
In Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England, Liz Oakley-Brown considers English versions of the Metamorphoses - a poem concerned with translation and transformation on a multiplicity of levels - as important sites of social and historical difference from the fifteenth to the early ...
By Christopher Braider
June 06, 2019
In his monumental study, Christopher Braider explores the dialectical contest between history and truth that defines the period of cultural transition called the 'baroque'. For example, Annibale Carracci's portrayal of the Stoic legend of Hercules at the Crossroads departs from earlier, more static...
By Aaron Kelly
June 06, 2019
For the past 30 years, the so-called 'Troubles' thriller has been the dominant fictional mode for representing Northern Ireland, leading to the charge that the crudity of this popular genre appropriately reflects the social degradation of the North. Aaron Kelly challenges both these judgments, ...
By Michael St John
November 17, 2016
This collection of fifteen essays looks at the theme of decadence and its recurring manifestations in European literature and literary criticism from medieval times to the present day. Various definitions of the term are explored, including the notion of decadence as physical decay. Some of the ...
By Martine Beugnet, Marion Schmid
May 22, 2017
Film established itself as an artistic form of expression at the same time that Proust started work on his masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. If Proust apparently took little interest in what he described as a poor avatar of reductive, mimetic representation, the resonances between his own...
By Katherine Haldane Grenier
May 16, 2017
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, legions of English citizens headed north. Why and how did Scotland, once avoided by travelers, become a popular site for English tourists? In Tourism and Identity in Scotland, 1770-1914, Katherine Haldane Grenier uses published and unpublished travel...
By Emily Eells
June 21, 2017
Proust's Cup of Tea analyzes Proust's reading of various Victorian authors and shows how they contributed to A la recherche du temps perdu. This book proves that British literature and art played a fundamental role in Proust's writing process by citing from the manuscript versions of his novel, as ...
By Glenn Hooper, Tim Youngs
February 27, 2017
Ranging from the early modern to the postcolonial, and dealing mainly with encounters in Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, Perspectives on Travel Writing is a collection of new essays by international scholars that examines some of the various contexts of travel writing, as well as its ...
Edited
By Nadia Valman, Tony Kushner
February 27, 2017
Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' both honours and carries on the work of The Rev. Dr. James Parkes (1896-1981), a pioneer in the many different fields involving the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The collection is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes'...
Edited
By Mike Pincombe
March 29, 2017
In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of 'The Renaissance' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, ...
By Helmut Kuzmics, Roland Axtmann
October 31, 2016
This book presents a cross-disciplinary and methodologically innovative study, combining historical macro-sociology and a sociology of emotions with historical anthropology and cultural studies. Drawing on the concepts and theories of Norbert Elias on the Civilizing Process, it sets out to pin down...