Much of The A-Z of Jane Austen pays attention to what you might call the ‘surface’ of Austen’s writings – to activities such as dance or matchmaking, for example, whose centrality in her storylines might seem to go without saying. In so doing I’m making the case that readings of Austen don’t necessarily have to… Read More »
Interview with Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White How would you describe your book in one sentence? KK & DEW: Our book gathers together essays that examine the impact of the Haitian Revolution on romantic-era writing—European, North American, and Haitian – and how those writings, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, registered and responded to events… Read More »
This week, in a series of blog takeovers, we’re looking at Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading with posts from the collection’s contributors. Guest post by Yan Tang Daniel Newman’s essay deftly moves from a generative reading of postcritique that calls for alternatives to Theory’s reductive tendency, to responsible reading as a pedagogy of sharing our myriad experiences… Read More »
We're very excited here at the Bloomsbury office to have received our rather beautiful printed copies of the magnificent two-volume Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Edited by Michael Hollington and a must for any University Library, this book brings together nearly fifty international contributors to provide a comprehensive survey of Charles Dickens's reception throughout… Read More »
It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set… Read More »
Dracula has attracted the attention of a remarkable breadth of critical and theoretical approaches over the past 50 years. These range from the most orthodox of 1970s Freudian interpretations to the acerbic historicist rejections of psychoanalysis characteristic of the 1990s, and encompass the intellectual shifts that have blurred the boundaries between feminism and gender studies,… Read More »
Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers, edited by Sarah Churchwell and Thomas Ruys Smith, offers a thorough and timely examination of American popular literature, from Charlotte Temple (1794) to The Da Vinci Code (2003). The first book of its kind, Must Read surveys the history of the American bestseller but also provides close critical readings of… Read More »
Beyond Discontent, the latest volume in our “New Directions in German Studies,” is by Eckart Goebel, Professor and Chair of German at New York University. The following, by the book’s translator, James C. Wagner, sums up its singular contribution rather neatly: "The fourth volume in Continuum's New Directions in German Studies series, Beyond Discontent: 'Sublimation'… Read More »
Improvisation as Art, the first book in our new series “New Directions in German Studies”, has been insightfully and well-reviewed in the latest issue of the German Quarterly. An extract: “Both students and scholars of 18th and early 19th-century German literature, as well as anyone interested in modern notions of art and improvisation will benefit… Read More »