In Tradition and Emancipation, Japanese scholar Megumi Ohsumi explores the mimetic encounters of classical material across Alexander Pope’s poetry. Focusing particularly on Pope’s Horatian Imitations, Ohsumi attempts to identify the extent to which mimesis plays a role in Pope’s oeuvre. Horace has remained one of the central Roman figures in classical tradition, and Renaissance humanism propelled Western European writers to explore his life and career and weave them into their own creative accounts.

Football as Literature adopts semiotics as a framework to compare football (soccer) to literature. The football field is akin to the plot or stage in narrative or dramatic modes, respectively, and the players are viewed as characters whose metamorphoses, in the text of football, are occasioned from the label of their positions to the completeness of the plot by the kinetic power of the ball. In employing this commentary, a standard football match is seen as a representation of the active text. Particularly, without commentary football unfolds as an unspoken semiotic narrative.

No dramatist has treated identity in as many ways and in such depth as William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s Identities, James P. Driscoll shows how the Bard used history, comedy, tragedy, and romance to develop comprehensive treatments of personal identity.

Literary critics have aptly noted that death is arguably the most frequent topic, theme, or occurrence in all of American literature. Naturally, the works of such authors as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Kate Chopin, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, among countless others, go to great lengths to support this observation; however, the renowned nineteenth-century American literary giant Herman Melville, most famous as the author of Moby Dick, has been frequently overlooked.

In Making Sense of Metaphors and Other Tropes, veteran literary scholar David Reid examines figures of speech, arguing that figures of speech in prose and poetry, literature and talk, make sense as turns of rhetoric by means of their energeia (vividness, radiance, éclat). Reid analyzes figures from Homer to literary giants of the twentieth century, mostly drawn from poetry, but also from prose and colloquial turns of phrase. Making Sense of Metaphors will delight all those who enjoy literature and good talk, and make them think about what so takes their fancy.

Foreword by Professor Joseph Donohue

“..Matos's important book provides a well-researched, well-written, and fascinating discussion of the notion of contagion from Ibsen and into Pinero and Jones.” Professor Gregory Tague, St Francis College, editor of Origins of English Literary Modernism,1870-1914

Margaret Atwood is arguably the most renowned and internationally acclaimed Canadian writer, poet, novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and environmental activist. In this incisive interpretation of Atwood’s prose, Candy D’Cunha argues that the novelist’s ecosophical vision provides valuable lessons that could help in creating a greater and more responsible awareness in the modern psyche about the environment.

In this engaging study, theatre scholar Robert J. Andreach argues, in what will be his final book, that the contemporary American theatre merits appreciation for dramatizing experiences in genres that jostle the audience into thinking about the experiences in new ways, based on five units of analysis: the naturalistic play, modernist theatre, trilogies, tragedy, and comedy.

For an author who tended to avoid explicitly Christian subjects in his plays and poems, Shakespeare showed an abiding interest in the spiritual qualities of his characters. Spiritual Shakespeare, the latest study by noted Shakespeare scholar E. L. Risden, considers the playwright not only as a Christian writer, but also one of considerable spiritual significance: the plays regularly highlight evidence of characters’ struggles with their own spiritual health. They often show the sorrows that result from spiritual blindness or neglect.

Translator:
Catherine A. Fitzpatrick