Publications
Now showing items 1-40 of 40
A Semiotic Analysis of the Short Stories of Leonid Andreev (1900-1909)
(1990)
This book applies the techniques of semiotic analysis to a selection of short stories by Leonid Andreev in an attempt to offer one answer to the problems of categorizing Andreev’s unique art and placing it within a ...
The Poetics of Mockery
(1995)
The Poetics of Mockery reconsiders Wyndham Lewis’s adversarial role in the modernist movement through a close reading of his prodigious satire of 1920s cultural politics. It presents a new interpretation of The Apes of God ...
Horace’s Epistles, Wieland and the Reader
(1995)
Wieland’s translations of Horace’s Epistles, neglected until recently, demonstrate his skill in overcoming the bipolar relationship implied in the very idea of translation. Thanks to a strong, cosmopolitan fellow-feeling ...
Spirit of the Totem
(1995)
The book presents an original, interdisciplinary analysis of religious and mythological perspectives in fiction published in the Soviet Union between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. In doing so, it points to ways in which ...
Quevedo on Parnassus
(1987)
Quevedo, who for much of his life was a nobleman politically active at court, is now remembered as one of the great writers of the Baroque era. His love poems are among the best regarded from his substantial poetic oeuvre, ...
The Ethics of Narration
(1989)
Colin Riordan finds the key to Uwe Johnson's puzzling works in an idiosyncratic moral code to which both Johnson and his narrative figures adhere. This code underlies the development in Johnson's prose from his first novel ...
Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter
(1991)
Brigid Haines focuses on the crucial interplay between dialogue and narrative in Adalbert Stifter’s works and relates this to their overall structure. Stifter, a conservative and often didactic writer, is nevertheless shown ...
History, Fiction, Verisimilitude
(1993)
This study of Gottfried von Strassburg discusses the narrative technique of his romance Tristan (c. 1210) against the double background of Latin rhetoric and poetics on the one hand, and the developing written vernacular ...
Violette Leduc
(1994)
Most analyses of Violette Leduc’s writing have concentrated on its autobiographical dimension, dealing almost exclusively with her best known volume, La Bâtarde. Violette Leduc: Mothers, Lovers, and Language offers readings ...
The Art Criticism of Francis Ponge
(1994)
This study of Francis Ponge’s essays on contemporary artists (L’Atelier contemporain) attempts to broaden the popular view of the author as a ‘poet of objects’. It explores Ponge’s perception of art criticism as an inherently ...
The Second Continuation of the Old French Perceval
(1987)
The main aim of this study of the second continuation of the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes is to establish exactly what it consists of, where it begins and ends, whether it is a single unit — and if not to what extent it ...
Georg Büchner's 'Dantons Tod'
(1982)
Büchner's turbulent drama Dantons Tod presents problems of characterisation on a different order of magnitude from those of the works which followed, not least because it was Büchner's first play, and a very ambitious one. ...
Sartre's Theory of Literature
(1979)
As an imaginative writer Sartre is fascinated by the role of imagination in the creative process. Moreover his critical, psychological and philosophical writings witness to a constant meditation on the function and status ...
Language and Style in a Renaissance Epic
(1982)
When, a generation later, Francesco Berni rewrote Boiardo's incomplete epic Orlando Innamorato, his contemporaries were not all convinced, and some considered it a usurpation. But Berni's aim was to modernise the text, ...
Bertolt Brecht's Adaptations for the Berliner Ensemble
(1975)
It is wrong to see Brecht as the gratuitous literary firebrand and revolutionary iconoclast of the popular image; a feature of his work, from the first to the last plays and theoretical writings, is his concern with a ...
The Realism of Luigi Capuana
(1979)
Despite a remote rural birth, in a small Sicilian town still not easily accessible, Capuana was to become a figure truly representative of Italian culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. He observed Garibaldi's ...
The Teaching of Gasparino Barzizza
(1979)
A study of the Italian humanist Gasparino Barzizza, or Gasparinus de Bergamo, a grammarian lecturing on Seneca, Cicero, Virgil and Terence, among others, in early fifteenth-century Padua. Mercer draws on literary sources ...
The Early Poetry of Guittone d'Arezzo
(1976)
Guittone d'Arezzo's critical fortunes have risen over the past fifty years to the point where he now commands grudging respect from serious readers of Duecento literature. But his poetry remains lapidary, often wilfully ...
Verse Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Vladimir Maiakovskii
(1989)
Maiakovskii himself said that a rhythmical 'rumble' was the basis of his verse, and demonstrated the actual generation of his verse from the bare rhythmical gul through intermediate versions to its final verbal form. In ...
A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition of The Birth of Merlin (Q1662)
(1991)
Credited on its first title page to William Shakespeare and William Rowley, The Birth of Merlin continues to provoke speculation about its place in the Shakespeare ‘Apocrypha’. The play is an imaginative re-working of the ...
Sexuality and the Sense of Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil
(1990)
This book undertakes a comparative reassessment of psychosexual concerns in the works of Georg Trakl and Robert Musil. The two authors, so different in other respects, are shown to converge in their coordinated treatment ...
The Problem of Christ in the Work of Friedrich Hölderlin
(1991)
This study sets out to challenge the usual approach to the question of Hölderlin’s response to Christ, which focuses on no more than two or three late hymns, by tracing, through each major stage of Hölderlin’s work, a ...
Symbolist Landscapes. The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle
(1989)
This study has two main aims. The first is to inform about approaches to painting among the poets and critics who, during the years 1885-95, were associated with the French Symbolist movement. The second is to examine the ...
The Twelfth-Century Psalter Commentary in French for Laurette d'Alsace
(1990)
Laurette d'Alsace, daughter of the Comte de Flandre, was married to four members of the northern French aristocracy and finally retreated to the Abbaye de Forest in Brussels. She was to remain there until her death in 1170, ...
Vaugelas and the Development of the French Language
(1987)
Claude Favre de Vaugelas, born in Savoy in 1585 and one of the founder members of the French Academy, is best known for his Remarques sur la langue française (1647) in which he sets out good usage of French. In this study, ...
The Work and Thought of Jean Grenier (1898-1971)
(1983)
For some, Jean Grenier is an intriguing philosopher and essayist, for others he is primarily the madter of Albert Camus. A prolific writer, he worked as a teacher until his retirement in 1968, holding posts in Egypt and ...
Les Enseignements de Théodore Paléologue
(1983)
Les Enseignemens ou Ordenances pour un Siegneur qui a Guerres et Grans Gouvernemens a Faire, often referred to as Les enseignements, was a military manual by Theodore I, Marquess of Montferrat (1290-1338). Originally ...
Valentin Rasputin and Soviet Russian Village Prose
(1986)
The city and the village represent two poles of Soviet society and ideology. The city symbolizes the future; the industrial proletariat is the natural ally of the Party. But the village provides a constant reminder of ...
Saint-Amant and the Theory of 'Ut Pictura Poesis'
(1972)
With the renewal of interest in seventeenth-century French baroque poets, a considerable number of studies have been devoted to the poetry of Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant (1594-1661). Almost without exception these ...
Edition Critique du Sermon 'Qui Manducat Me' de Robert Ciboule (1403-58)
(1971)
An edition in French text. Malgré une vie toute consacrée à la diplomatie et au service de l'Université de Paris, à prêcher et à écrire, Robert Ciboule reste mal connu. A. Combes lui a consacré deux articles importants, ...
Techniques of Solipsism
(1970)
Theodor Storm, born in 1817, was at first a poet of the bleak North Sea plains, but emerged after the liberal revolutions of 1848 as a major German writer of novellas. Though considered a social realist, Storm also asked ...
Voltaire's Disciple
(1972)
Although events in La Harpe's life led him to become a friend of the Catholic revival during which Chateaubriand, to name only one, was pleased to have his support, he is rightly best remembered as a disciple of Voltaire ...
Matthew Arnold and Goethe
(1979)
Writing to Cardinal Newman in 1872, Arnold said that there are four people, 'in especial', from whom he had learned habits: Goethe, Wordsworth, Saint-Beuve, and Newman himself. His notebooks and reading lists confirm a ...
The Significance of Locality in the Poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin
(1979)
Hölderlin's poetic world, seen at its most coherent in the mature poetry of 1800-02, is part classical and Homeric, part allegorical and vague, and part based on the true geography of his beloved homeland, Swabia — his ...
The Theme of Love in the 'Romans d'Antiquité'
(1972)
The group of romans antiques comprises the romans of Thèbes, Eneas, Troie and Alexandre, and the poems of Piramus et Tisbé and Narcisus. These works have two points in common: they all deal with material from Greek or Roman ...
Jean Brisebarre: 'Li Restor du Paon'
(1980)
This is a critical edition of the Restor du Paon, a poem attributed to Jean Brisebarre which was composed some time before 1338, though its exact date is uncertain. This book, originally published in paperback in 1980 under ...
Epic and Chronicle
(1983)
The Poema de mio Cid is one of the oldest extant literary works in Castilian, and the most complete epic poem of the Spanish medieval period now known to us in a form close to that in which it was originally written, perhaps ...
Character, Ideology, and Symbolism in the Plays of Wedekind, Sternheim, Kaiser, Toller, and Brecht
(1985)
Gonçalves da Silva studies a range of expressionist playwrights who transformed German drama in the twentieth century: from Frank Wedekind, who grew up in a Swiss castle, became an actor and was imprisoned for satirical ...
Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science
(1970)
This book, originally published in 1970 and later given the ISBN 978-0-900547-06-5, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
The Vorau 'Moses' and 'Balaam'
(1970)
A study of the Vorauer Bücher Moses, a collection of vernacular poems in Early High Middle German from the twelfth-century MS 276. The text, named for the Styrian monastery of Vorau where MS 276 was found, was probably ...