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What was caricature to novelists in the Romantic period? Why does Jane Austen call Mr Dashwood's wife 'a strong caricature of himself'? Why does Mary Shelley describe the body of Frankenstein's creature as 'in proportion', but then 'distorted in its proportions' - and does caricature have anything to do with it? This book answers those questions, shifting our understanding of 'caricature' as a literary-critical term in the decades when 'the English novel' was first defined and canonised as a distinct literary entity. Novels incorporated caricature talk and anti-caricature rhetoric to tell readers what different realisms purported to show them. Recovering the period's concept of caricature, Caricature and Realism in the Romantic Novel sheds light on formal realism's self-reflexivity about the 'caricature' of artifice, exaggeration and imagination. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

English fiction --- Caricature in literature. --- Realism in literature. --- 19th century

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Fabienne Michelet analyses how the Anglo-Saxons' spatial imaginaire shaped perceptions and representations of geographical space, both in historical documents and verse. She highlights the links between place, identity and collective destiny.

English literature --- Geography in literature. --- Place (Philosophy) in literature. --- Civilization, Anglo-Saxon, in literature. --- Topography in literature --- History and criticism.

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This volume argues that Greek tragedy as a genre is characterized by plots centering on kin killing. It contains a detailed analysis of five plays, and comprehensive documentation of this plot pattern in all of the extant tragedies, and in the lost plays of the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Greek drama (Tragedy) --- Friendship in literature. --- Murder in literature. --- Families in literature. --- Love in literature. --- Family in literature --- History and criticism. --- Families in literature --- Friendship in literature --- Love in literature --- Murder in literature --- Mythology, Greek, in literature --- History and criticism --- Mythology, Greek, in literature. --- Family in literature.

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What is a reference to an Italian Egyptologist doing in Louisa May Alcott's portrait of domesticity in Little Women? Why does Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's painter protagonist Avis Dobell know - and care - that her red shawl is dyed with desiccated beetles? Why might W. E. B. Du Bois's fictional sharecropper display a reproduction of a painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau near his cotton field? These questions, and more, are answered by Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930. An interdisciplinary study of references to internationally-traded commodities in US fiction, this book assembles an integrated geopolitical analysis of Americans' material, gendered, and aesthetic experiences of empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining allusions to contested goods like cochineal, cotton, oranges, fur, gold, pearls, porcelain, and wheat, it reveals a linked global imagination among authors who were often directly or indirectly critical of US imperial ambitions. Furthermore, the book considers the commodification of art itself, interpreting writers' allusions to paintings, sculptures, and artists as self-aware acknowledgments of their own complicity in global capitalism. As Consuming Empire in US Fiction, 1865-1930 demonstrates, literary texts have long trained consumers to imagine their relationship to the world through the things they own.

American fiction --- History and criticism. --- Commercial products in literature. --- Consumption (Economics) in literature. --- Imperialism in literature.

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This is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the Decameron's response to classical and medieval didactic traditions. Olivia Holmes unearths the rich variety of Boccaccio's sources, ranging across Aesopic fables, narrative collections of Islamicate origin, sermon-stories and saints' lives, and compilations of historical anecdotes. Examining the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents in relation to medieval notions of narrative exemplarity, the study also considers how they intersect with current critical assertions of fiction's power to develop empathy and emotional intelligence. Holmes argues that Boccaccio provides readers with the opportunity to exercise both what the ancients called 'Ethics,' and our contemporaries call 'Theory of Mind.' This account of a vast tradition of tale collections and its provocative analysis of their workings will appeal to scholars of Italian literature and medieval studies, as well as to readers interested in evolutionary understandings of storytelling.

Exempla in literature. --- Philosophy of mind in literature. --- Ethics in literature. --- Boccaccio, Giovanni,