Literature highlights 2024

Posted by Bethan Hirst - Wednesday, 10 Jan 2024

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At the start of the new year, we want to take the opportunity to highlight a selection of fantastic literary studies books publishing throughout 2024. Written for scholars, students, and literature enthusiasts hungry for fresh insights and thorough analyses, we believe these titles will captivate you as much as they’ve captivated us. From Shakespeare to apocalyptic imaginations, these titles seek new interpretations of key themes from within Literary Studies.

Browse our seasonal catalogue for a full list of books publishing in autumn/winter 2024.

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Barbara Comyns

This biography of Barbara Comyns presents a twentieth-century author whose life was as extraordinary as her novels. Hundreds of unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose complicated life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society.

Mid-century women's writing

This book re-examines British women's writing in the mid-century and its relationship to public and domestic spaces.

Beckett's afterlives

Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to posthumous adaptations of Beckett's oeuvre. This collection analyses the remarkable diversity of creative engagements across different media and cultural contexts that have ensured the survival and continuing relevance of Beckett's work in a constantly changing world.

After the end

Through sources from literature and film to comics, music and the built environment across the globe, this work studies the enduring legacy of Cold War culture in current debates and concerns around risk, security, borders, environmental justice, inequality and apocalypse.

Revolutionary bodies

An ambitious and wide-ranging study of the Irish gay novel, not merely in relation to a broader Irish political and historical narrative, but also a global one of increasing neoliberal domination legitimated by liberal social politics.

Readers and mistresses

Part recovery and part new reading method, this work locates the few kept mistresses in Victorian literature, while offering a queer way to read for their existences when less legible. This book offers a way to read old material with new eyes and a social justice ethic.

Thierry and Theodoret

This is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Fletcher, Massinger, and Field's Thierry and Theodoret, with an introduction that reassesses sources (including Shakespeare) and discusses the authorship and reception of this captivating play, pointing the way for future study, especially of a historical or gender-based nature.

Gothic dreams and nightmares

This interdisciplinary text combines an attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with a rigorous close reading of literary, artistic, and televisual works, both classic and lesser known. It investigates how the Gothic and the concepts of dreams and nightmares have intersected from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day.

Thomas Nashe and literary performance

Thomas Nashe is typically regarded as an urban author and a University wit, but his writings are inflected and shaped by regional travel, 'non-literary', non-elite works, and oral culture. The essays in this collection address Nashe's use of the past, his engagement with the Elizabethan present, and his textual legacy.

Shakespeare's liminal spaces

Shakespeare's liminal spaces provides a unique set of perspectives through which Shakespeare's forests, battlefields, shores and gardens are revealed as deliberate dramatic devices with the capacity to destabilise social structures.

Shakespeare's adolescents

Shakespeare's adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of the 'signs' of the maturation used to construct Shakespeare's many adolescent characters.

Shakespeare's borrowed feathers

This book uses the latest techniques in textual analysis to reveal the influence of a community of English playwrights on the celebrated works of William Shakespeare.

Courteous exchanges

This book offers new connections between Spenser and Shakespeare by showing how their works hone readers' and audiences' judgement about the social construction of aristocratic identity.

Dick of Devonshire

The first ever critical edition of Thomas Heywood's 1626 play, Dick of Devonshire, presented for the first time with an anthology of its source material.

Tis Pity She's a Whore

A scholarly, modern-spelling critical edition of John Ford's 1633 play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.

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