Polity has a cutting-edge list in literary studies and cultural theory, and publishes many distinguished authors who have shaped the debates in this field. Alongside works by continental writers such as Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Habermas, Derrida, Bourdieu and Primo Levi, we also publish innovative new books by leading British and North American scholars.
Visit our highlights page for more information on our new and forthcoming general interest titles.
Hallamore Caesar and Caesar: Modern Italian Literature
“A brilliant book that moves with agility through the centuries, authors, and historical events. It is a cultural and literary guide that any student of Italian should rely on.”
Graziella Parati, Dartmouth College
A synoptic overview at the beginning of the volume is designed to help the reader get her or his bearings in the detail of the nine chapters which follow. Using an essentially chronological framework, the book is divided into three major cultural time-spans: the long eighteenth century, the decades of national identity formation and the creation of modern', industrial Italy between 1816 and 1900, and the twentieth century with its constant renegotiation of national cultural identity. A final epilogue provides a snapshot of Italian literary culture in the near-present.
Clark: Renaissance Drama
"Sandra Clark's long and distinguished career as a Shakespeare scholar illuminates every page of this magisterial study. Familiar with so many works of Renaissance drama, she draws on her extensive knowledge of early modern culture to demonstrate just how the theatre reflects the society. Clark’s study will be widely adopted for use in sixth-form and university classrooms."
John W. Mahon, co-editor, Shakespeare Newsletter
Watt: Medieval Women’s Writing
"I am delighted by the appearance of this book. Lucidly written for a general audience, Medieval Women’s Writing is by far the most interesting, balanced, and up-to-date study now in print. But it is more than this: it is also a collection of original readings of major women writers, which has new and often powerful things to say about how we think about women’s writing in the premodern period, and about what it means to describe this writing as a 'women’s literary tradition'. Flexible, passionate, ethically engaged, Medieval Women’s Writing will be a valuable and much-discussed resource for scholars, teachers, students, as well as general readers."
Nicholas Watson, Harvard University
Cartelli & Rowe: New Wave Shakespeare on the Screen
The past fifteen years have witnessed a diverse group of experiments in ‘staging' Shakespeare on film. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen introduces and applies the new analytic techniques and language that are required to make sense of this new wave.
Bulman: Creative Writing A Guide and Glossary to Fiction Writing
This book defines fictional techniques and guides to the potential writer in their use and will be an essential purchase for students of creative writing from ‘A' level onwards.
Armstrong: Modernism
The last 20 years has seen an explosion of work on literary modernism and its cultural and historical contexts. In this innovative study aimed at a general audience, Tim Armstrong seeks to define modernism not only by its aesthetics and literary genres but also by its links with broader cultural areas in which the ‘modern' is implicated and debated, and which inform its representational modes.
Whitmarsh: Ancient Greet Literature
This book will be important reading for undergraduates, in their first year and above, of ancient Greek literature and culture. All texts in the volume are translated, and no knowledge of ancient Greek literature is assumed.
Scott Warren: Early Modern English Literature
'Surveys and samplings of periods have a tendency to sacrifice subtlety for sweep, and clarity for coverage. When the period in question is arguably the richest in literary history then there's a real risk of summary and synthesis becoming superficial. Fortunately, Jason Scott-Warren's superb overview is as precise as it is panoramic. Clinically executed close readings of texts coupled with painstakingly elaborated cultural contexts make this a must-read volume for students and scholars alike.'
Willy Maley, University of Glasgow
Polity's innovative Cultural History of Literature series aims to explore the links between literature and culture. Each volume places literary texts in their broader cultural, political and social contexts, striving for a balance between textual and contextual analysis. Individual books focus on literary genres, periods, movements or national literatures.
The books in this series examine the uses of Shakespeare in a range of cultural forms, considering the ways in which Shakespeare's work has been adopted and adapted. As a whole, the series will provide an illuminating survey of the diverse cultural uses to which Shakespeare's work has been put.
This series is designed to fill the need for a coherent group of studies on the literature of the twentieth century in relation to wider issues of cultural history. The immediate aim of the series will be to provide innovative and accessible texts for undergraduate students of literary and cultural studies. The books in the series will focus on themes of central importance to cultural and literary developments since 1900. Forthcoming developments include books on Postmodernism, War Literature, Literature and Sexuality, Literature and Technology and Globalization and Literature.
This series makes available to a wide audience the ideas of some of the most influential thinkers of our time. Cutting across the boundaries between academic disciplines and between different traditions of thought, the series addresses European as well as Anglo-American thinkers. The books are written in a clear and concise way, making them suitable for students and for the interested general reader.
New and published titles of particular interest to literature students and lecturers are listed below. Please check other subject pages for further titles in this series.
