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Cambridge Companions are lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics and periods. All are collections of specially commissioned essays, shaped and introduced to appeal to student readers. Together the chapters add up to a systematic critical account of, for example Plato, Luther, Jane Austen, Tom Stoppard or Stravinsky, the French Novel or Jewish American Literature, and each book is supported by reference features such as a chronology and guide to further reading.Companions have colonised several fields within Humanities. The first two titles - Companions to Shakespeare and to Chaucer - were published in 1986. They were commissioned to meet a demand from students who wanted reasonably priced critical books that offered a variety of viewpoints rather than a single, idiosyncratic voice. From those beginnings we now have over 130 titles in Literature, over 60 in Philosophy and plenty more on musical, classical, religious and artistic topics. We have moved beyond single figures to offer Companions to literary and artistic genres and periods, musical instruments, and modern European cultures.Companions are designed not only to offer a comprehensive overview of their chosen topic, but to display and provoke lively and controversial debate.

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443 results in Cambridge Companions to Literature

Page 4 of 23

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen
  • Edited by Russell Jackson
  • Published online:
    11 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen provides a lively guide to film and television productions adapted from Shakespeare's plays. Offering an essential resource for students of Shakespeare, the companion considers topics such as the early history of Shakespeare films, the development of 'live' broadcasts from theatre to cinema, the influence of promotion and marketing, and the range of versions available in 'world cinema'. Chapters on the contexts, genres and critical issues of Shakespeare on screen offer a diverse range of close analyses, from 'Classical Hollywood' films to the BBC's Hollow Crown series. The companion also features sections on the work of individual directors Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Franco Zeffirelli, Kenneth Branagh, and Vishal Bhardwaj, and is supplemented by a guide to further reading and a filmography.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts
  • Edited by Orietta Da Rold, Elaine Treharne
  • Published online:
    11 December 2020
    Print publication:
    17 December 2020
  • The scholarship and teaching of manuscript studies has been transformed by digitisation, rendering previously rarefied documents accessible for study on a vast scale. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts orientates students in the complex, multidisciplinary study of medieval book production and contemporary display of manuscripts from c.600–1500. Accessible explanations draw on key case studies to illustrate the major methodologies and explain why skills in understanding early book production are so critical for reading, editing, and accessing a rich cultural heritage. Chapters by leading specialists in manuscript studies range from explaining how manuscripts were stored, to revealing the complex networks of readers and writers which can be understood through manuscripts, to an in depth discussion on the Wycliffite Bible.

The Cambridge Companion to English Dictionaries
  • Edited by Sarah Ogilvie
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    24 September 2020
  • How did a single genre of text have the power to standardise the English language across time and region, rival the Bible in notions of authority, and challenge our understanding of objectivity, prescription, and description? Since the first monolingual dictionary appeared in 1604, the genre has sparked evolution, innovation, devotion, plagiarism, and controversy. This comprehensive volume presents an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content and a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries. Essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography (dictionary making) explore its power in standardising varieties of English and defining nations seeking independence from the British Empire: from Canada to the Caribbean. Leading scholars and lexicographers historically contextualise an array of dictionaries and pose urgent theoretical and methodological questions relating to their role as tools of standardisation, prestige, power, education, literacy, and national identity.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four
  • Edited by Nathan Waddell
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2020
  • George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) remains a book of the moment. This Companion builds on successive waves of generational inheritance and debate in the novel's reception by asking new questions about how and why Nineteen Eighty-Four was written, what it means, and why it matters. Chapters on a selection of the novel's interpretative contexts, the literary histories from which it is inseparable, the urgent questions it raises, and the impact it has had on other kinds of media, ranging from radio to video games, open up the conversation in an expansive way. Established concerns (e.g. Orwell's attitude to the working class, his anxieties about the socio-political compartmentalization of the post-war world) are presented alongside newer ones (e.g. his views on evil, and the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four on comics). Individual essays help us see in new ways how Orwell's most famous work continues to be a novel for our times.

The Cambridge Companion to The Canterbury Tales
  • Edited by Frank Grady
  • Published online:
    21 August 2020
    Print publication:
    10 September 2020
  • Chaucer's best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales, is justly celebrated for its richness and variety, both literary - the Tales include fabliaux, romances, sermons, hagiographies, fantasies, satires, treatises, fables and exempla - and thematic, with its explorations of courtly love and scatology, piety and impiety, chivalry and pacifism, fidelity and adultery. Students new to Chaucer will find in this Companion a lively introduction to the poem's diversity, depth, and wonder. Readers returning to the Tales will appreciate the chapters' fresh engagement with the individual tales and their often complicated critical histories, inflected in recent decades by critical approaches attentive to issues of gender, sexuality, class, and language.

The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies
  • Edited by Siobhan B. Somerville
  • Published online:
    02 June 2020
    Print publication:
    11 June 2020
  • This Companion provides a guide to queer inquiry in literary and cultural studies. The essays represent new and emerging areas, including transgender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, queer of color critique, performance studies, and studies of digital culture.  Rather than being organized around a set of literary texts defined by a particular theme, literary movement, or demographic, this volume foregrounds a queer critical approach that moves across a wide array of literary traditions, genres, historical periods, national contexts, and media. This book traces the intellectual and political emergence of queer studies, addresses relevant critical debates in the field, provides an overview of queer approaches to genres, and explains how queer approaches have transformed understandings of key concepts in multiple fields.

The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee
  • Edited by Jarad Zimbler
  • Published online:
    26 April 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2020
  • Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee is amongst the most acclaimed and widely studied of contemporary authors. The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee provides a compelling introduction for new readers, as well as fresh perspectives and provocations for those long familiar with Coetzee's works. All of Coetzee's published novels and autobiographical fictions are discussed at length, and there is extensive treatment of his translations, scholarly books and essays, and volumes of correspondence. Confronting Coetzee's works on the grounds of his practice, the chapters address his craft, his literary relations and horizons, and the relationship between his writings and other arts, disciplines and institutions. Written by an international team of contributors, this Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to this important writer, establishes new avenues of discovery, and explains Coetzee's undiminished ability to challenge and surprise his readers with inventive works of striking power and intensity.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
  • Edited by J. Michelle Coghlan
  • Published online:
    17 March 2020
    Print publication:
    19 March 2020
  • This Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day, as well as an illuminating introduction to cookbooks as literature. Bringing together sixteen original essays by leading scholars, the collection rethinks literary food from a variety of critical angles, including gender and sexuality, critical race studies, postcolonial studies, eco-criticism and children's literature. Topics covered include mealtime decorum in Chaucer, Milton's culinary metaphors, early American taste, Romantic gastronomy, Victorian eating, African-American women's culinary writing, modernist food experiments, Julia Child and cold war cooking, industrialized food in children's literature, agricultural horror and farmworker activism, queer cookbooks, hunger as protest and postcolonial legacy, and 'dude food' in contemporary food blogs. Featuring a chronology of key publication and historical dates and a comprehensive bibliography of further reading, this Companion is an indispensible guide to an exciting field for students and instructors.

The Cambridge Companion to 'Lyrical Ballads'
  • Edited by Sally Bushell
  • Published online:
    08 February 2020
    Print publication:
    09 January 2020
  • Lyrical Ballads (1798) is a work of huge cultural and literary significance. The volume of poetry, in which Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere and Wordsworth's Lines written above Tintern Abbey were first published, lies at the heart of British Romanticism, establishing a poetics of powerful feeling, that is, nonetheless, expressed in direct, conversational language and exploring the everyday realities of common life. This engaging, accessible collection provides a comprehensive overview of current approaches to Lyrical Ballads, enabling readers to find fresh ways of understanding and responding to the volume. Sally Bushell's introduction explores how the Preface to the second edition (1800) became a potent manifesto for the Romantic movement. Broad in scope, the Companion includes accessible essays on Wordsworth's experiments with language and metre, ecocritical approaches, the reception of the volume in America and more; furnishing students and scholars with a range of entry points to this seminal text.

The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore
  • Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri
  • Published online:
    24 December 2019
    Print publication:
    09 April 2020
  • This is the first one-volume guide in English, or indeed in Bengali, to the full spectrum of Tagore's multi-faceted genius. It has two parts: (a) critical surveys of the chief sectors of his artistic output and its reception; (b) specialized studies of particular topics. The authors are among the leading Tagore experts from India and abroad. They have drawn upon all relevant material in Bengali, English, and other languages, including the entire body of untranslated Bengali works that comprise the greater part of Tagore's oeuvre. They have also considered the historical and cultural context of his time. The book includes an index of all primary works cited, with full details of their complex history of transmission, and a reading list for Tagore studies in English. It will be an indispensable guide for all scholars, students and informed general readers, even those who can access Tagore in Bengali.

The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s
  • Edited by James Smith
  • Published online:
    18 December 2019
    Print publication:
    19 December 2019
  • The 1930s is frequently seen as a unique moment in British literary history, a decade where writing was shaped by an intense series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks. Yet what is contained under the rubric of 1930s writing has been the subject of competing claims, and therefore this Companion offers the reader an incisive survey covering the decade's literature and its status in critical debates. Across the chapters, sustained attention is given to writers of growing scholarly interest, to pivotal authors of the period, such as Auden, Orwell, and Woolf, to the development of key literary forms and themes, and to the relationship between this literature and the decade's pressing social and political contexts. Through this, the reader will gain new insight into 1930s literary history, and an understanding of many of the critical debates that have marked the study of this unique literary era.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature
  • Edited by Candace Barrington, Sebastian Sobecki
  • Published online:
    26 July 2019
    Print publication:
    08 August 2019
  • Despite an unprecedented level of interest in the interaction between law and literature over the past two decades, readers have had no accessible introduction to this rich engagement in medieval and early Tudor England. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature addresses this need by combining an authoritative guide through the bewildering maze of medieval law with concise examples illustrating how the law infiltrated literary texts during this period. Foundational chapters written by leading specialists in legal history prepare readers to be guided by noted literary scholars through unexpected conversations with the law found in numerous medieval texts, including major works by Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Malory. Part I contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices and institutions in medieval England, and Part II covers medieval texts and authors whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law.

The Cambridge Companion to Virgil
  • 2nd edition
  • Edited by Charles Martindale, Fiachra Mac Góráin
  • Published online:
    06 July 2019
    Print publication:
    18 April 2019
  • The poet Virgil remains the most significant and influential figure in Latin literature, and this expanded and updated Companion covers his life, work, and reception from antiquity to the present. The Aeneid, the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Appendix Vergiliana are all discussed, as are art, history, politics, and philosophy; Virgil's literary style is carefully explored along with poetic traditions before and since, and chapters engage with his poems and their reception from perspectives including intertextuality, narratology, gender theory, philology and historicism. Leading authors cover topics from translations and commentaries to genre, authority, and characterisation, providing revised and updated recommendations for further reading. This volume is an accessible introduction to Virgil and his legacy for students and teachers, while also providing wide-ranging and in-depth investigations that will appeal to scholars of classical literature and other disciplines.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language
  • Edited by Lynne Magnusson, David Schalkwyk
  • Published online:
    01 July 2019
    Print publication:
    08 August 2019
  • The power of Shakespeare's complex language - his linguistic playfulness, poetic diction and dramatic dialogue - inspires and challenges students, teachers, actors and theatre-goers across the globe. It has iconic status and enormous resonance, even as language change and the distance of time render it more opaque and difficult. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Language provides important contexts for understanding Shakespeare's experiments with language and offers accessible approaches to engaging with it directly and pleasurably. Incorporating both practical analysis and exemplary readings of Shakespearean passages, it covers elements of style, metre, speech action and dialogue; examines the shaping contexts of rhetorical education and social language; test-drives newly available digital methodologies and technologies; and considers Shakespeare's language in relation to performance, translation and popular culture. The Companion explains the present state of understanding while identifying opportunities for fresh discovery, leaving students equipped to ask productive questions and try out innovative methods.

The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan
  • Edited by Dominic Head
  • Published online:
    24 June 2019
    Print publication:
    04 July 2019
  • This Companion showcases the best scholarship on Ian McEwan's work, and offers a comprehensive demonstration of his importance in the canon of international contemporary fiction. The whole career is covered, and the connections as well as the developments across the oeuvre are considered. The essays offer both an assessment of McEwan's technical accomplishments and a sense of the contextual factors that have provided him with inspiration. This volume has been structured to highlight the points of intersection between literary questions and evaluations, and the treatment of contemporary socio-cultural issues and topics. For the more complex novels - such as Atonement - this book offers complementary perspectives. In this respect, The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan serves as a prism of interpretation, revealing the various interpretive emphases each of McEwan's more complex works invite, and to show how his various recurring preoccupations run through his career.

The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature
  • Edited by Crystal Parikh
  • Published online:
    24 June 2019
    Print publication:
    11 July 2019
  • Literature has been essential to shaping the notions of human personhood, good life, moral responsibility, and forms of freedom that have been central to human rights law, discourse, and politics. The literary study of human rights has also recently generated innovative and timely perspectives on the history, meaning, and scope of human rights. The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature introduces this new and exciting field of study in the humanities. It explores the historical and institutional contexts, theoretical concepts, genres, and methods that literature and human rights share. Equally accessible to beginners in the field and more advanced researches, this Companion emphasizes both the literary and interdisciplinary dimensions of human rights and the humanities.

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018
  • Edited by Peter Boxall
  • Published online:
    12 June 2019
    Print publication:
    27 June 2019
  • From 1980 to the present, huge transformations have occurred in every area of British cultural life. The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 ushered in a new neoliberal era in politics and economics that dramatically reshaped the British landscape. Alongside this political shift, we have seen transformations to the public sphere caused by the arrival of the internet and of social media, and changes in the global balance of power brought about by 9/11, the emergence of China and India as superpowers, and latterly the British vote to leave the European Union. British fiction of the period is intimately interwoven with these historical shifts. This collection brings together some of the most penetrating critics of the contemporary, to explore the role that the British novel has had in shaping the cultural landscape of our time, at a moment, in the wake of the EU referendum of 2016, when the question of what it means to be British has become newly urgent.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought
  • Edited by Gregory Claeys
  • Published online:
    08 June 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019
  • The nineteenth century was seemingly a period of great progress. Huge advancements and achievements were made in science, technology and industry that transformed life and work alike. But a growing pride in modernity and innovation was tainted by a sense of the loss of the past and the multiple threats which novelty posed. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought provides an impressive survey of the period's major ideas and trends. Leading scholars explore some of the most influential concepts and debates within philosophy, history, political thought, economics, religion and the social sciences, as well as feminism and imperialism. Some of these debates continued into the following century and many still remain relevant in the present day. This Companion is an excellent tool for readers seeking to understand the genesis of modern discourse across a range of humanities and social science subjects.

The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes
  • Edited by Janice M. Allan, Christopher Pittard
  • Published online:
    29 April 2019
    Print publication:
    02 May 2019
  • Sherlock Holmes is the most famous fictional detective in history, with a popularity that has never waned since catching the imagination of his late-Victorian readership. This Companion explores Holmes' popularity and his complex relationship to the late-Victorian and modernist periods; on one hand bearing the imprint of a range of Victorian anxieties and preoccupations, while on the other shaping popular conceptions of criminality, deviance, and the powers of the detective. This collection explores these questions in three parts. 'Contexts' explores late-Victorian culture, from the emergence of detective fiction to ideas of evolution, gender, and Englishness. 'Case Studies' reads selected Holmes adventures in the context of empire, visual culture, and the gothic. Finally, 'Holmesian Afterlives' investigates the relationship between Holmes and literary theory, film and theatre adaptations, new Holmesian novels, and the fandom that now surrounds him.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Religion
  • Edited by Hannibal Hamlin
  • Published online:
    12 April 2019
    Print publication:
    28 March 2019
  • Nothing in Shakespeare's England was as important as religion. Questions of faith informed everything from history and politics to love and family, work and play, good and evil, suffering and sacrifice, and ultimately life and death. Every one of Shakespeare's plays is rich in allusions to the Bible, church rites including baptism, communion, marriage, and burial, and a host of religious beliefs. This Companion provides an essential grounding in early modern religious history and culture and the ideas that Shakespeare returns to throughout his career. Chapters dedicated to close-readings of individual plays or groups of plays span both the complex and variegated Christian beliefs explored in Shakespeare's work, as well as the treatment of Judaism, Islam and classical paganism. Authored by an international team of eminent scholars and featuring an Afterword by Rowan Williams, this Companion is the most comprehensive and incisive guide to the topic that students will find.

Page 4 of 23