Brian Richardson

The spread of printing to Renaissance Italy had a dramatic impact on all users of books. As works came to be diffused more widely and cheaply, so authors had to adapt their writing and their methods of publishing to the demands and opportunities of the new medium, and reading became a more frequent and user-friendly activity. Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy focuses on this interaction between the book industry and written culture. After describing the new technology and the contexts of publishing and bookselling, it examines the continuities and changes faced by writers in the shift from manuscript to print, the extent to which they benefited from print in their careers, and the greater accessibility of books to a broader spectrum of readers, including women and the less well educated. This is the first integrated study of a topic of central importance in Italian and European culture.

Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy

Jon Broome

A guide to all aspects of building for oneself. It relates personal experience of putting theory into practice, gives a range of built examples and includes a practical guide to organizing a project covering land, finance, permissions and professional help. It also contains a detailed manual on the Walter Segal method of timber-frame construction, because of its particular advantage to self-builders. The authors argue for a housing policy that would extend self-build opportunities.

The Self-build Book

Jan Alber

Henrik Skov Nielsen

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative offers a collection of foundational essays introducing the reader to the full scope of unnatural narrative theory: its meaning, its goals, its extent, its paradoxes. This volume brings together a distinguished group of international critics, scholars, and historians that includes several of the world's leading narrative theorists. Together, they survey many basic areas of narrative studies from an unnatural perspective: story, time, space, voice, minds, narrative levels, "realism," nonfiction, hyperfiction, and narrative poetry. Rarely have these fundamental concepts been subjected to such an original and thoroughgoing reconceptualization. Much of the book is directed toward an investigation of experimental and antirealist work. Each essay focuses on texts and episodes that narrative theory has tended to neglect, and each provides theoretical formulations that are commensurate with such exceptional, albeit neglected, works. A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative articulates and delineates the newest and most radical movement in narrative studies. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of narrative studies and of the history and theory of modern fiction.

A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative

The current period has seen the rise of Islamophobia, a resurgence of fascism in Europe and constant attempts to scapegoat immigrants. This book seeks to challenge the idea that racism is inevitable by taking a critical look at the origins and history of racism in Britain and abroad. The eight authors' shared Marxist approach and activist history ensure a smooth narrative and a clear argument for the struggle for liberation today.

Marxism and the Fight Against Racism

Say it Loud!

Guido Bonsaver

Giuseppe Stellardi

Throughout the centuries, the Italian peninsula has played an important role as a crossroads where different cultures met, transformed and continued their journeys. This volume retraces some of these crossings, in the fields of literature, architecture and cinema: from the influence of the classical heritage, to the origins and diffusion of the Italian Renaissance, to the role of individuals in the discovery and transmission of knowledge, and the dialogue in and through translation with other national cultures, European and beyond. The volume marks the retirement of Martin McLaughlin from the Agnelli-Serena Chair of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford and celebrates his highly distinguished career in Italian studies. Professor McLaughlin's research has ranged from classical literatures to the Renai-ssance and to modern and contemporary literature. He has published a host of ground-breaking books, edited volumes, articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics, as well as outstanding translations of Calvino and Eco. No less significant have been his teaching, his roles in the running of academic journals and monograph series, and his contributions to the life of the academic community.

Essays in Honour of Martin McLaughlin

Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy

Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice provides the first extended account of the concepts and history of unnatural narrative. In this book, Brian Richardson, founder of unnatural narrative studies, offers a theoretical model that can encompass antirealist and antimimetic works from Aristophanes to postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative begins with a sustained critique of contemporary narratology, diagnosing its mimetic bias and establishing the need for a more comprehensive account. This new approach results in original theoretical insights into the basic elements of story, such as beginnings, sequencing, temporality, endings, and narrative itself. Applying these theoretical insights, Richardson also provides a compelling alternative view of the history of narrative. He traces a genealogy of unnatural narratives from ancient Greek and Sanskrit works through medieval and renaissance fiction to eighteenth-century and romantic fiction. The study continues through the twentieth century, discussing the unnatural elements of Ulysses and other early twentieth-century texts, and engages with contemporary fiction by offering an alternative account of postmodernism. Unnatural Narrative makes an essential intervention in narrative theory and an important contribution to the history of the novel.

Theory, History, and Practice

Unnatural Narrative

Stefano Dall'Aglio

Massimo Rospocher

This book studies the uses of orality in Italian society, across all classes, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the interrelationships between oral communication and the written word. The Introduction provides an overview of the topic as a whole and links the chapters together. Part 1 concerns public life in the states of northern, central, and southern Italy. The chapters examine a range of performances that used the spoken word or song: concerted shouts that expressed the feelings of the lower classes and were then recorded in writing; the proclamation of state policy by town criers; songs that gave news of executions; the exercise of power relations in society as recorded in trial records; and diplomatic orations and interactions. Part 2 centres on private entertainments. It considers the practices of the performance of poetry sung in social gatherings and on stage with and without improvisation; the extent to which lyric poets anticipated the singing of their verse and collaborated with composers; performances of comedies given as dinner entertainments for the governing body of republican Florence; and a reading of a prose work in a house in Venice, subsequently made famous through a printed account. Part 3 concerns collective religious practices. Its chapters study sermons in their own right and in relation to written texts, the battle to control spaces for public performance by civic and religious authorities, and singing texts in sacred spaces.

Voices and Texts in Early Modern Italian Society

Luca Degl’Innocenti

Chiara Sbordoni

Investigating the interrelationships between orality and writing in elite and popular textual culture in early modern Italy, this volume shows how the spoken or sung word on the one hand, and manuscript or print on the other hand, could have interdependent or complementary roles to play in the creation and circulation of texts. The first part of the book centres on performances, ranging from realizations of written texts to improvisations or semi-improvisations that might draw on written sources and might later be committed to paper. Case studies examine the poems sung in the piazza that narrated contemporary warfare, commedia dell'arte scenarios, and the performative representation of the diverse spoken languages of Italy. The second group of essays studies the influence of speech on the written word and reveals that, as fourteenth-century Tuscan became accepted as a literary standard, contemporary non-standard spoken languages were seen to possess an immediacy that made them an effective resource within certain kinds of written communication. The third part considers the roles of orality in the worlds of the learned and of learning. The book as a whole demonstrates that the borderline between orality and writing was highly permeable and that the culture of the period, with its continued reliance on orality alongside writing, was often hybrid in nature.

Interactions between Orality and Writing in Early Modern Italian Culture

"Story, in the largest sense of the term, is arguably the single most important aspect of narrative. But with the proliferation of antimimetic writing, traditional narrative theory has been inadequate for conceptualizing and theorizing a vast body of innovative narratives. In A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives, Brian Richardson proposes a new, expansive model for understanding story and plot, including beginnings, endings, temporality, and unusual narrative progressions. While he focuses on late modernist, postmodern, and contemporary narratives, the study also includes many earlier works, spanning from Aristophanes and Shakespeare through James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter. By exploring fundamental questions about narrative, Richardson provides a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive theory that includes neglected categories of storytelling and significantly enhances our treatment of traditional areas of analysis. Ultimately, this book promises to transform and expand the study of story and plot"--

Theorizing Unruly Narratives

A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-first Century

James Phalen

Peter Rabinowitz

This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. The text is designed as a basic reader for graduate courses in narrative and critical theory across disciplines including literature, drama and theatre, and film. Narrative Dynamics includes such classic exponents as E. M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; R. S. Crane on plot; Boris Tomashevsky on story, plot, and, motif; M. M. Bakhtin on the chronotope; and Gerard Genette on narrative time. Richardson highlights essential feminist essays by Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility, Rachel Blau Duplessis on closure, and Susan Winnett on narrative and desire. These are complimented by newer pieces by Susan Stanford Friedman on spatialization and Robyn Warhol on serial fiction. Other major contributions include Edward Said on beginnings, Hayden White on historical narrative, Peter Brooks on plot, Paul Ricoeur on time, D. A. Miller on closure, James Phelan on progression, and Jacques Derrida on the frame. Recent essays from the perspective of cultural studies, postmodernism, and artificial intelligence bring this collection right up to the present.

Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames

Narrative Dynamics

Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Unnatural Voices

Glanville Price

Now in its second edition, the MHRA Style Guide is an indispensable tool for authors and editors of scholarly books, contributors to academic publications, and students preparing theses. The Style Guide succeeds the best-selling MHRA Style Book, five editions of which were published from 1971 to 1996. Though originally designed for use in connection with the publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Style Book became a standard book of reference, particularly in the humanities, and has been adopted by many other authors, editors, and publishers. This new edition of the Style Guide has been revised and updated by a subcommittee of the MHRA. It provides comprehensive guidance on the preparation of copy for publication and gives clear and concise advice on such matters as spelling (including the spelling of proper names and the transliteration of Slavonic names), abbreviations, punctuation, the use of capitals and italics, dates and numbers, quotations, notes, and references. Chapters on indexing, the preparation of theses and dissertations, and proof correcting are also included

A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses

MHRA Style Guide

The first comprehensive guide to women's promotion and use of textual culture, in manuscript and print, in Renaissance Italy.

Women and the Circulation of Texts in Renaissance Italy

George Eliot wrote that "man cannot do without the make-believe of a beginning." Beginnings, it turns out, can be quite unusual, complex, and deceptive. The first major volume to focus on this critical but neglected topic, this collection brings together theoretical studies and critical analyses of beginnings in a wide range of narrative works spanning several centuries and genres. The international and interdisciplinary scope of these essays, representing every major theoretical perspective--including feminist, cognitive, postcolonial, postmodern, rhetorical, ethnic, narratological, and hypert.

Theories and Practices

Narrative Beginnings

The MHRA Style Guide is intended primarily for use in connection with books and periodicals published by the Modern Humanities Research Association, but it is also widely useful to students and other authors, to editors, and to publishers of texts written mainly in English. Its chapters deal with preparing material for publication; spelling and usage; names; abbreviations; punctuation; capitals; italics; dates, numbers, currency, and weights and measures; quotations and quotation marks; footnotes and endnotes; references; the preparation of indexes; useful works of reference; and proof correction. This third edition has been revised and updated in the light of developments in technology and means of communication, and of suggestions made by users of the second edition. It introduces a Quick Guide to the main features of MHRA style, and it gives fuller information on referencing, including online publications and social media, and on indexing.

Brian Richardson

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