Palgrave imprint: 15119 books

Based on refractions of earlier beliefs, modern angels - at once terrible and comforting, frighteningly other and reassuringly beneficent - have acquired a powerful symbolic value. This interdisciplinary study looks at how humans conversed with angels in medieval and early modern Europe, and how they explained and represented these conversations.

William Langland's poem Piers Plowman is one of the most popular and widely-studied Middle English works. This comprehensive, readable guide leads the student chronologically through the entire text and is designed to be read alongside it. Assuming no previous knowledge, readers are introduced to...

A vivid exploration of the history of a very powerful and long lasting idea: building European worlds outside of Europe. Veracini outlines how the founding of new societies was envisaged and practiced and explores the specific ways in which settler colonial projects tried to establish ideal and regenerated political bodies.

As theatres expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the distance between actor and audience became a telling metaphor for the distance emerging between writers and readers. Nuss explores the ways in which theatre helped authors imagine connecting with a new mass audience.

Using contemporary literary representations of place, this study focuses on works that have participated in the emergence of new conceptions of place and new place-based identities. The analyses draw on research in cultural geography, cognitive science, urban sociology, and globalization studies.

This book examines how early modern and recently emerging theories of consciousness and cognitive science help us to re-imagine our engagements with Shakespeare in text and performance. Papers investigate the connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness...

Newly revised and enlarged, the second edition of A Conrad Chronology draws upon a rich range of published and unpublished materials. It offers a detailed factual record of Joseph Conrad's unfolding life as seaman and writer as well as tracing the compositional and publication history of his major works.

This volume is the first to focus on a particular complex of questions that have troubled Wittgenstein scholarship since its very beginnings. The authors re-examine Wittgenstein’s fundamental insights into the workings of human linguistic behaviour, its creative extensions and its philosophical...

Beth Lord looks at Kant's philosophy in relation to four thinkers who attempted to fuse transcendental idealism with Spinoza's doctrine of immanence. Examining Jacobi, Herder, Maimon and Deleuze, Lord argues that Spinozism is central to the development of Kant's thought, and opens new avenues for understanding Kant's relation to Deleuze.

An interdisciplinary study of the supernatural and the occult in fin-de-siècle France (1870-1914), the present volume examines the explosion of interest in devil-worship, magic and mysticism both from an historical perspective and through analysis of key literary works of the period.

Living Poetry demonstrates that poems are vital expressions of how we live, feel and think. Lucidly written and jargon free, it introduces a range of poems from the Elizabethan age to the present day, presenting practical models of close reading and a stimulating rationale for the power of poetry to move and excite us.

The appearance in 1609 of Shakespeare's Sonnets is cloaked in mystery and controversy, while the poems themselves are masterpieces of silence and deception. The intervening four centuries have done little to diminish either their mystique or their appeal, and recent years have witnessed an upsurge...

This Guide offers a comprehensive survey of the key criticism on Shakespeare's tragedies, from the seventeenth century through to the present day. Introducing essential concepts, themes and debates, and summarising major critical texts, Nicolas Tredell examines how the category of Shakespeare's tragedies has been constructed, contested and changed.

Traversing the themes of language, terror and representation, this is the first study to engage Coleridge through the sublime, showing him to have a compelling position in an ongoing conversation about finitude. Drawing on close readings of both his poetry and prose, it depicts Coleridge as a thinker of 'the limit' with contemporary force.