Susan Watkins

Mark Fiennes

Traces the iconic British monarch's self-transformation as a part of her effort to capture the hearts of her people, citing the threats to her rule that motivated her choices, her careful construction of the royal image, and her role in shaping court life and architecture. Reprint.

Elizabeth I and Her World

Graham Atkin

Chris Walsh

A Practical Introduction

Studying Literature

Boston Review

Leading scientists, epidemiologists, and philosophers explore the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic and argue for the necessity of scientific reasoning and collective responsibility. We are living in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of our time. Confronting the many challenges of this moment--from the medical to the economic, the social to the political--demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. Bringing together coverage of the unfolding pandemic from the critically acclaimed Boston Review, this collection explores the history and social legacies of pandemics, explores the place of science in popular culture and policy-making, and interrogates the ways in which science and health have been politicized. Thinking in a Pandemic collects the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it. While much remains uncertain, our responsibility to public reason is sure. Now, more than ever, we affirm the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a healthier and more just world. Contributors: Marc Lipsitch, Natalie Dean, Trisha Greenhalgh, John P. A. Ioannidis, Alex de Waal, Jeremy A. Greene, Dora Vargha, Jonathan Fuller, Jonathan White, Sarah Burgard, Lucie Kalousova, Cailin O'Connor, James Owen Weatherall, Amy Moran-Thomas.

A High Politics of the Left

Thinking in a Pandemic

The story of Mary Queen of Scots whose "inheritance gave her the Scottish throne in 1542, when she was just six days old, and a claim to the English throne that was to lead to her death." Includes contemporary photographs and historical illustrations.--Jacket.

Mary, Queen of Scots

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and has recently published what she has announced will be her final novel. Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing’s relationship with feminism and the impact of her 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, this book argues that Lessing's writing was formed by her experiences of the colonial encounter; it makes use of postcolonial theory and criticism to examine Lessing's continued interest in ideas of nation, empire, gender and race and the connections between them. The book examines the entire range of her writing, including her most recent fiction and non-fiction, which have been comparatively neglected. The book is aimed at undergraduate and postgraduate students of Doris Lessing’s work as well as the general reader who enjoys her writing. This is the first significant book-length critical evaluation in ten years.

Doris Lessing

This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depicts the end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to this trend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporary women’s work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for the past, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much male authored apocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readers the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning for society, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploring science, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time, narrative and history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the book covers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality.

Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Jago Morrison

This study re-examines the twentieth-century novel as a form shaped by its problematic, often scandalous relation to the public sphere. Discussing ten texts against the challenges of their milieus, it considers twentieth-century fiction as a tradition of transgression, perennially caught between license and licentiousness, erudition and sedition.

The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere

Scandalous Fictions

Clare Hanson

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

Volume Nine

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975

Alice Ridout

Despite winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Doris Lessing has received relatively little critical attention. One of the reasons for this is that Lessing has spent much of her lifetime and her long published writing career crossing both national and ideological borders. This essay collection reflects and explores the incredible variety of Lessing's border crossings and positions her writing in its various social and cultural contexts. Lessing crosses literal national borders in her life and work, but more controversial have been her crossings of genre borders into sci-fi and "space fiction", and her crossing of ideological borders such as moving into and out of the Communist Party and from a colonial into a post-colonial world. This timely collection also considers a number of the most interesting recent critical and theoretical approaches to Lessing's writing, including work on maternity and abjection in relation to The Fifth Child and The Grass is Singing, eco-criticism in Lessing's 'Ifrakan' novels, and postcolonial re-writings of landscape in her African Stories.

Susan Watkins

Books

Your next favorite book is out there