Pleasures of Literary Spatiality: Expanding and Contracting Settings reveals how famous works/writers use spatiality to add dimension and drama to their work. How and when they expand or contract the spaces and places where their characters appear leads to interesting twists in structural development, emotional content, and thematic issues.
Tolkien’s Intellectual Landscape shows how J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth comes alive in all sorts of ways: how the world itself is a living character, how the work drew inspiration from and provided it to so many other writers, and how the language and history continue to enliven the contemporary landscape of fantasy in many media
Heroes, Gods and the Role of Epiphany in English Epic Poetry examines the phenomenon common to great poems in the epic tradition: the tendency to meet beings of another order—perhaps heavenly, perhaps infernal, perhaps of a different order in nature—and what comes of those meetings.
Beowulf on Film: Adaptations and Variations, co-written with notable scholar Nickolas Haydock, energetically studies movies based on the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem—movies that may or many not bear the same title as the original.
Beowulf for Business shows how the great medieval epic includes subtle but pertinent and powerful advice for the modern entrepreneur—or anyone interested in how to apply the advice of the past to the problems and possibilities of the present.
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Beowulf: A Verse Translation for Students aims to provide a modern English text as true to the original and as readable as possible particularly for the use of students or general readers.
Alfgar’s Stories from Beowulf includes four fictional stories, couched in the context of the possible “author” or speaker of the poem, that begin with allusions in the poem and expand into exciting tales of their own.
Beasts of Time: Apocalyptic Beowulf enumerates the many and telling connections between the poem and Christian and Norse/Germanic eschatological traditions.
Hollywood in the Holy Land, co-edited with fellow medievalist Nickolas Haydock, includes a broad range of essays on movies that deal with the medieval European Crusades in the Middle East. The surprising range of cinematic subjects and interpretations unveils a fraught and complex history of entertaining grandeur and disturbing colonialism.
Shakespeare and the Problem Play shows how nearly all of the masterful playwright’s works defy simple classification by genre. Their complexity of form as well as content allows for many interpretations in reading and performance.
Spiritual Shakespeare: Religious Subtext in the Plays offers some approaches to the Christian context and content of the bard’s life, times, and works.
Shakespeare’s Dramatic Maxims collects the notable sayings or aphorisms from Shakespeare’s plays to explicate this important and frequently employed technique in his use of language. The sayings often have great impact on the creation of dramatic character, on narrative tension, and on the unfolding of the ideas that inhabit and deepen the plays as literary works.
On Shakespeare in Sonnets blends the processes of “scholarship” and “creative writing” into a small volume that uses a collection of sonnets to comment on Shakespeare’s plays. It includes an introduction to the idea of poetry as literary criticism, an essay that expands on how these sonnets explicate the plays, and a brief but potent bibliography.
Narrative Subversion in Medieval Literature comprises a theoretical volley into literary narratology in the context of famous and powerful stories of the Middle Ages.
Seeking the Beautiful: A Study in Literary Aesthetics articulates a theory of literary aesthetics to show that while beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, considering, outlining, and discussing what one beholds and where the pleasure of beauty comes into play can increase a reader’s pleasure and understanding of works of literary art.
Sir Gawain and the Classical Tradition collects essays by outstanding contemporary scholars on the great entertaining and troubling Middle English Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. How does the poem draw on Classical materials, and for what purposes?
Prophet Margins: The Medieval Vatic Impulse and Social Stability, co-edited with Karen Moranski and Stephen Yandell, includes a collection of scholarly essays on the idea of the prophetic—often misunderstood as predictive rather than diagnostic—in medieval literature.
How English Works comprises a readable textbook geared to an introductory study of an array of subjects in linguistics for college students beginning their studies in a range of disciplines from Education to languages to literature or philosophy.
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Toward a Theory of Anglo-Saxon Humor includes an introduction to and discussion of humor theory as a means to address instances of humor in the Anglo-Saxon literary corpus.
A Living Light, a fictionalized biographical short novel, develops a moving account of the life and work of the German nun and abbess Hildegard of Bingen, one of the foremost intellectuals of the Middle Ages.