San Antonio College Library

"John Milton is one of the most important and influential writers in English literary history. The goal of this book is to make Milton's works more accessible and enjoyable by providing a comprehensive overview of the author's life, times and writings. It describes essential details from Milton's biography, explains some of the cultural and historical contexts in which he wrote, offers fresh analyses of his major pamphlets and poems - including Lycidas,...

"Building on existing surveys of contemporary English fiction, this timely book focuses on key novels by eleven major English novelists who have broken in different ways from the realist British novel of the postwar period without losing their broad appeal among readers. These writers have reacted to the Thatcherite revolution that thrust Britain into the modern world of multinational capitalism by giving unusual fictional shape to the impact of global...

"These 14 chapters of original research, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, provide an invaluable insight into the complex and various Gothic forms of the nineteenth century. Covering a range of diverse contexts, the chapters focus on science, medicine, Queer theory, imperialism, nationalism, and gender. Together with further chapters on the ghost story, realism, the fin de siècle, pulp fictions, sensation fiction, and the Victorian...

"The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century, and the advent of print in the fifteenth. This Companion maps out the flourishing field of medieval literary studies and points towards new directions and approaches."--Back cover.

"In Thinking without Thinking in the Victorian Novel, Vanessa L. Ryan demonstrates how both the form and the experience of reading novels played an important role in ongoing debates about the nature of consciousness during the Victorian era. Revolutionary developments in science during the mid- and late nineteenth century -- including the discoveries and writings of Herbert Spencer, William Carpenter, and George Henry Lewes -- had a vital impact on...

"In The Lotus and the Lion, J. Jeffrey Franklin traces the historical and cultural origins of Western Buddhism, showing that the British Empire was a primary engine for curiosity about and then engagement with the Buddhisms that the British encountered in India and elsewhere in Asia." "In this book, Franklin analyzes responses to and constructions of Buddhism by popular novelists and poets, early scholars of religion, inventors of new religions, social...

Nichols chronicles the Enlightenment view of 'nature' as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic 'nature' characterized by dynamic links among all living things.

The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, the author focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence,...