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Radegund of Poitiers (520–587) was a princess of the Thuringian kingdom, wife to the Merovingian king Clothar I, and ultimately domina of the abbey of Sainte-Croix in Poitiers. The literary persona of Saint Radegund, as constructed by the poet-hagiographer Venantius Fortunatus and, a few years later, by the nun Baudonivia, underpins the historical figure. The saint exerted a significant cultural influence across Frankish territories, and over the ages her image has been continuously received, reinterpreted, and expanded. The purpose of this study is to provide a survey of the critical reception of Radegund’s character, in order to explore how modern scholarship has interpreted and reimagined her persona over time.

Given that the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was personally acquainted with the modernist master James Joyce, and even helped research and promote Finnegans Wake, it should come as no surprise that Beckett was greatly influenced by Joyce's own work. However, much analysis of Beckett's work tends to argue that he forged his own artistic identity in opposition to Joyce, seeking and eventually finding styles and methods unoccupied by his \"mentor.\" Beckett's Dedalus is a comprehensive reassessment of this line of criticism and traces the nature and extent of Joyce's influence in more complex, contestatory, and complementary ways throughout all of Beckett's major fiction. Paying close attention to the extensive network of allusions Beckett derived from Joyce's writing, P.J. Murphy reveals how Beckett consistently echoed and engaged in dialogue with Joyce's works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and, in particular, its protagonist Stephen Dedalus. This study proposes that the relationship between the two writers was a complex life-giving and art-building dialogue concerned with aesthetic theories, depictions of reality, and the artistic integrity needed to carry out these critical investigations. Beckett's Dedalus is a fascinating study of the literary influence one generation has on the next. It will change the way we consider the relationship between two of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

In recent decades, physicians have diagnosed fictional and non-fictional characters through portraits, biographies and writing. We argue that such an exercise can be beneficial for a uniquely health humanities reason—better understanding of our current world and the social determinants of health. Drawing on the method of health and social justice studies, we explore the character of Shosha, who appears repeatedly in the writings of Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer’s strong story-telling skill and commitment to writing about the Jewish communities of prewar Poland in vivid detail preserve a slice of history, ensure that future generations will better understand what was destroyed by Nazi extermination policies, and provide lessons for modern political, hunger and war threats to human health. Shosha suffers from a lifelong debilitating disease that neither Singer nor subsequent commentaries ever name. The authors focus first on diagnosing the disease by consulting medical literature and experts. They then examine the value and pitfalls of this exercise and suggest that the lessons of understanding the disease historically, for teaching physicians how to recognise diseases rooted in war and poverty, and for enlightening all of us to the risks faced in human health by a world increasingly taking up arms and sliding towards fascism make diagnosing Shosha necessary and meaningful.

Does a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory. Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels asPride and Prejudice,Great Expectations, andLe Père Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The \"character-space,\" as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation. Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.

This is an encyclopedic work, arranged by broad categories and then by original authors, of literary pastiches in which fictional characters have reappeared in new works after the deaths of the authors that created them.

From the patricians of the early republic to post-Reconstruction racial scientists, from fin de siecle progressivist social reformers to post-war sociologists, character, that curiously formable yet equally formidable stuff, has had a long and checkered history giving shape to the American national identity.Bodies of Reform reconceives this pivotal category of nineteenth-century literature and culture by charting the development of the concept of character in the fictional genres, social reform movements, and political cultures of the United States from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. By reading novelists such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman alongside a diverse collection of texts concerned with the mission of building character, including child-rearing guides, muscle-building magazines, libel and naturalization law, Scout handbooks, and success manuals, James B. Salazar uncovers how the cultural practices of representing character operated in tandem with the character-building strategies of social reformers. His innovative reading of this archive offers a radical revision of this defining category in U.S. literature and culture, arguing that character was the keystone of a cultural politics of embodiment, a politics that played a critical role in determining-and contesting-the social mobility, political authority, and cultural meaning of the raced and gendered body.

Caligula would seem obvious material for a lusty Hollywood biopic. This chapter offers a brisk summary overview of how the screen portraits, drawing primarily on ancient sources and modern novels, led the way to Caligula. Caligula's notoriety inspired numerous low‐budget and strictly fictional 'sexploitation' films, mostly Italian, in which his partner in sexual misdeeds is often Messalina, his uncle Claudius' proverbially lascivious fourth wife, 'one of the most notorious aristocratic sluts in history' and 'a cinematic natural'. In truth, Caligula's depiction within fictional screen adaptations as villainous sideshow rather than leading man is not so very different from the other emperors’. Surprisingly few biopics have been made about either them or indeed other major Roman figures. People can briefly survey how screen depictions of Caligula integrated ancient scandalous rumours into their narratives, before turning to Caligula, which is ‘a dramatisation of all the most scurrilous stories in Suetonius'.

Borden begins her spare, lyrical text with the Hamburg childhoods of her protagonists, Hans Augusto Reyersbach and Margarete Waldstein, who grew up to become H.A. and Margaret Rey. From Hamburg to Rio de Janeiro to prewar Paris, the narrative--stunningly embellished ...