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The works of Ambrosiaster, a Christian writing in Rome in the late 4th century, were influential on at the time and throughout the Middle Ages. This book starts by addressing the problem of the author's mysterious identity (which scholars have puzzled over for centuries) and places him in a broad historical and intellectual context. Later, it addresses Ambrosiaster's political theology, an idea which has been explored in other late Roman Christian writers but which has never been addressed in his works. The book also looks at how Ambrosiaster's attitudes to social and political order were formed on the basis of theological concepts and the interpretation of scripture, and shows that he espoused a rigid hierarchical and monarchical organization in the church, society, and the Roman empire. He also traced close connections between the Devil, characterized as a rebel against God, and the earthly tyrants and usurpers who followed his example.

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant—from straight-forward descriptive words like “sweet” and “fragrant”, colorful metaphors like “ostentatious” and “brash”, to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliché. The question is: what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way? This book explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. The conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? This book shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. The book also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.

This book offers a critical account of Elizabeth Bowen, a significant 20th-century Irish writer still too little known and appreciated. It considers her novels, short stories, essays, and family history, showing how her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions. The book explores Bowen's adaptation of Irish Protestant Gothic in relation to the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, especially the London Blitz. It reads her explorations of childhood as a response both to Henry James and to the European novel of adultery. Focusing on the ideas of return and reflex, it reads the presence of the supernatural, and of other kinds of haunting, in her work in relation to concepts drawn from both Freud and T. S. Eliot. The book also makes use of non-fictional materials in its interpretations, notably, Bowen's wartime reports from neutral Ireland and the diaries of her wartime lover Charles Ritchie. The intention is to demonstrate the ways in which Bowen's writing merges personal story with public history. The book's radical readings, which depend on a wealth of original research, propose that Bowen is as important to 20th-century literary studies as her much better-known Irish Protestant fellow writer, Samuel Beckett.

As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens became one of America's first modern celebrities, successfully straddling the conflicts between culture and commerce. Twain manipulated the cultural outlets of his day, not only through publication of his diverse novels, but through newspapers, magazines, book reviews, advertising, and his popular performances and readings. This book examines a range of Twain's major works to show how the writer strove to establish his authority over the course of his career. For the author, Samuel Clemens's supreme fiction and most explicitly artful performance was Mark Twain, the fiction that authorized his fiction. The author reconstructs that performance as the moment at which the American Writer emerged as a profession. He gives attention to the historical and cultural context of the Gilded age, from Twain's influential contemporary William Dean Howells to the various genre books that Twain consistently mastered, e.g. travel guidebooks, manuals for boys, and autobiographies. The result is that this book will appeal to both Twain scholars and to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

In what was once described as ‘the century of nerves’, a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This elegant study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. The book looks at some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, and gives readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions — a range which includes work by Charlotte Brontë and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, this book is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.

The history of Virgil and his receptions is long and varied. His 20th-century career transformed his appearance as an anaemic imitator of Homer into the ‘Father of the West’, speaking above all for the marginalized and exiled. At the turn of the millennium it is women writers who, having been largely absent from the story of Virgil's reception, are for the first time shaping a new aetas Vergiliana by drawing on his poems to speak of their own preoccupations and concerns. Through an analysis of Virgil's presence in the work of contemporary women writers from North America (Joyce Carol Oates, Janet Lembke, Ursula Le Guin), Britain (Margaret Drabble, A. S. Byatt, Ruth Fainlight, Michèle Roberts, Carol Ann Duffy, U. A. Fanthorpe, Josephine Balmer), Ireland (Eavan Boland), and continental Europe (Christa Wolf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, and Monique Wittig), this book identifies a new Virgil: one who speaks in female tones of the anxieties, exclusions, pleasures, and threats of the contemporary world. While each of the female writers included in this volume draws upon her own distinct cultural heritage, the book focuses on a number of shared themes and values which emerge through their work.

This full-length life of John Henry Newman is a comprehensive biography of both the man and the thinker and writer. It draws extensively on material from Newman's letters and papers. Newman's character is revealed in its complexity and contrasts: the legendary sadness and sensitivity are placed in their proper perspective by being set against his no less striking qualities of exuberance, humour, and toughness. The book attempts to do justice to the fullness of Newman's achievement and genius: the Victorian “prophet” or “sage”, who ranks among the major English prose writers; the dominating religious figure of the nineteenth century, who can now be recognised as the forerunner of the Second Vatican Council and the modern ecumenical movement; and finally, the universal Christian thinker, whose significance transcends his culture and time.