A Guide to English: Periods and Movements in Commonwealth Literatures

"From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant. An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers." - from the publisher

"This new edition contains more than 600 entirely new entries, to reflect the new figures and issues of English literature in the new millennium, and the existing entries have been extensively revised and updated to incorporate the latest scholarship. But it remains faithful to Sir Paul Harvey's original vision of an authoritative work placing English literature in its widest context: no other volume offers such extensive exploration of the classical roots of English literature and the European authors and works that influenced its development, in recognition of the fact that literature in English cannot and should not be divorced from the cultural context from which it grew." "Also updated are the invaluable appendices, including the major literary awards and their winners and a full chronology spanning a thousand years of English literature, from Beowulf to the present day. Informed by the latest scholarly thinking, and comprehensively cross-referenced to guide the reader to topics of related interest." - from the publisher

"

A complete chronicle of the literature of the British Isles, from Beowulf to the beginning of the third millennium. This classic work of literary history not only provides an encyclopedic survey, but also a personal, chronological interpretation of the English tradition with an emphasis on the continuity of major literary forms and on the ways in which important figures transform the art. The many literary genres, themes, and authors that receive a fascinating analysis include The Epic; Chaucer; Two Versions of the Pastoral; The Sonnet; Spenser's Garden; Shakespeare; Revenge Tragedy; Restoration Comedy; Inventing the Novel; Gothic Follies; Wordsworth and Coleridge; and Imagination and Fiction." - from the publisher

"In that vast English library which has been steadily growing for fourteen hundred years, there is happily much that concerns us not, much that is no part of our national inheritance. There are more than enough of books that are no books, of literature that does not deserve the name, of poems that are not poetry, of prose which is a mere waste of weary words. Even so, of English books new and old that it is worth our while to know, or know about, there are many more than would suffice for a lifetime of hard reading. British publications multiply by thousands in a year, and American volumes at an almost equal rate. The flood, constantly swelling, threatens to engulf even the strongest swimmer. Year by year the need becomes greater for an approved mentor, a comprehensive guide ; and such a Vademecum Dr Robert Chambers devised and called, not unjustly, a CYCLOPAEDIA OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, the first of its kind in Britain." - from the editor's preface

Librarian's note: An old but still highly readable encyclopedia of English literature, covering the period from the beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century. Many of the best prose stylists of latter half of the nineteenth century contributed bio-bibliographical essays to Chambers's Cyclopaedia, making the entries frequently enjoyable on their own stylistic merits along with the generous excerpts provided of each author.

"This book explores the history of literature as a history of changing media and modes of communication, from manuscript to print, from the codex to the computer, and from paper to digital platforms. It argues that literature has evolved, and continues to evolve, in sync with material forms and formats that engage our senses in multiple ways. Because literary experiences are embedded in, and enabled by, media, the book focuses on literature as a changing combination of material and immaterial features. The principal agents of this history are no longer genres, authors, and texts but configurations of media and technologies. In telling the story of these combinations from prehistory to the present, Ingo Berensmeyer distinguishes between three successive dominants of media usage that have shaped literary history: performance, representation, and connection. Using English literature as a test case for a long view of media history, this book combines an unusual bird?s eye view across periods with illuminating readings of key texts. It will prove an invaluable resource for teaching and for independent study in English or comparative literature and media studies." - from the publisher

"This is the first full-scale history of medieval English literature in nearly a century. Thirty-three contributors provide information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception. The volume also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers the most extensive account available of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists." - from the publisher

"This book introduces students to the literature of Anglo-Saxon England, the period from 600–1066, in a collection of fifteen specially commissioned essays. The Companion is aimed at students encountering Old English literature for the first time, who require clear guidance and orientation in an unfamiliar field. The first chapters describe briefly the political, social and ecclesiastical history of the period and how poetry and prose developed and flourished. A succinct account of Old English language provides beginners with a guide to grammar, syntax and vocabulary. Subsequent chapters explore such topics as Germanic legend and heroic ideals, paganism and fatalism, the cult of saints and responses to the Bible. Important prose texts, such as those by Bede, Alfred, Aelfric and Wulfstan, are covered under these thematic headings. Poems such as The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rood, are discussed in detail, but in association with related texts, in prose as well as poetry. A separate chapter is devoted to Beowulf, but aspects of the poem are also discussed in other chapters. Finally a bibliography lists essential editions, reference works and critical studies." - from the publisher

"For more than a thousand years, the adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table have been retold across Europe. They have inspired some of the most important works of European literature, particularly in the medieval period: the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. In the nineteenth century, interest in the Arthurian legend revived with Tennyson, Wagner and Twain. This Companion outlines the evolution of the legend from the earliest documentary sources to Spamalot, and analyses how some of the major motifs of the legend have been passed down in both medieval and modern texts. With a map of Arthur's Britain, a chronology of key texts and a guide to further reading, this volume itself will contribute to the continuing fascination with the King and his many legends." - from the publisher

"This companion challenges readers to think beyond a narrowly defined canon and conventional disciplinary boundaries in a number of important ways. Firstly, the companion's date range reflects the erosion of the traditional, rigid boundary between medieval and early modern literature. Secondly, the structure of the book stresses the importance of constructing contexts for reading literature. Thirdly, the companion explores the extent to which medieval literature is in dialogue with other cultural products, including the literature of other countries, manuscripts and religion." - from the publisher

"A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature examines contexts that are essential to understanding and interpreting writing in English produced in the period between approximately 1100 and 1500. The essays in the book are focused around the concept that Middle English literature is 'different' from the literature of other periods, and that it is this difference that makes it especially fascinating for readers. Tying information about the period to the analysis of texts, the book includes discussion of such issues as the religious and historical background to Middle English literature, the circumstances and milieux in which it was produced, its linguistic features, and the manuscripts in which it has been preserved. Amongst the great range of writers and writings discussed, the book considers the works of the most widely read Middle English author, Chaucer, against the background of the period that he both typifies and subverts. This engaging book offers readers who are approaching Middle English literature for the first time the information that they need to understand a period that is sometimes perceived to be arcane. The incorporation of fresh material and new insights also makes this volume essential reading for specialists in the field." - from the publisher

"This collection of essays offers a pioneering review of women's access to literary culture in medieval Britain, and their representation within it. The rise of female literacy and women's activities as writers, patrons and readers, are examined in the context of wider questions of orality and literacy. The representation of women in different literary genres, secular and religious, shows the ways in which their position was understood in a variety of roles, as lovers, mothers and saints." "This revised edition, newly available in paperback, includes a unique chronology offering a woman-centred perspective on historical and literary events before 1500, together with a guide to further reading." - from the publisher

"Complete longer works: Beowulf; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; The York Play of the Crucifixion; The Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play; Everyman." - from the publisher

"This collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents is designed for students of Chaucer and Middle English literature. It makes readily available accounts of key historical events and descriptions of pertinent cultural phenomena. Brings together in one volume fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historical and cultural texts. Documents shed light on the themes and styles that appear in Chaucer and other Middle English literature. Contains twelve important images from the period. Concise introductions and bibliographies accompany all documents." - from the publisher

"The texts of the seven romances included--Havelok, Ywain and Gawain, Sir Orfeo, Sir Launfal, The Awntyrs off Arthure at the Terne Wathelyne, The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and The Sege off Melayne--are complete, authoritative (rendered from the best manuscripts), and comprehensively glossed and annotated for undergraduate readers. In addition to their literary importance, the seven romances were chosen because they shed light on other important Middle English texts. Sources and Backgrounds offers comparative analogues (many complete) to each of the seven romances. These readings enable students to understand the genre in the context of related medieval ideas and attitudes. Criticism collects four essays that provide a variety of perspectives on Middle English romances by Erich Auerbach, John Finlayson, A. C. Baugh, and Gisela Guddat-Figge." - from the publisher

"This anthology offers a fruitful exploration of the boundary between literary and popular culture, and showcases an impressive breadth of literature, including songs, drama, and ballads. Familiar texts such as the visions of Margery Kempe and the Paston family letters are featured alongside lesser-known works, often oral. This striking diversity extends to the language: the anthology includes Scottish literature and original translations of Latin and French texts." - from the publisher

"This is the first full-scale history of early modern English literature in nearly a century. It offers new perspectives on English literature produced in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While providing the general coverage and specific information expected of a major history, its twenty-six chapters address recent methodological and interpretive developments in English literary studies. While England is the principal focus, literary production in Scotland, Ireland and Wales is treated, as are other subjects less frequently examined, including women's writings and the literature of the English Reformation and Revolution. This innovatively designed history is an essential resource for specialists and students." - from the publisher

"From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, humanism played a key role in European culture. Beginning as a movement based on the recovery, interpretation and imitation of ancient Greek and Roman texts and the archaeological study of the physical remains of antiquity, humanism turned into a dynamic cultural programme, influencing almost every facet of Renaissance intellectual life. The fourteen original essays in this volume deal with all aspects of the movement, from language learning to the development of science, from the effect of humanism on biblical study to its influence on art, from its Italian origins to its manifestations in the literature of More, Sidney and Shakespeare. A detailed biographical index, and a guide to further reading, are provided. Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism provides a comprehensive introduction to a major movement in the culture of early modern Europe." - from the publisher

"Designed for both students and general readers, this introduction to Renaissance and Reformation literature offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance. It considers the ways in which early modern writers constructed the past and designed the present, wrote about people and places, recovered and adapted classical genres, and tackled religious and secular controversies." "All these topics are illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts, including works by More, Erasmus, Wyatt, Spenser, Philip and Mary Sidney, Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Campion, Daniel, Donne, Southwell, Dekker, Taylor 'the water-poet', Aemilia Lanyer, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, Mary Wroth, Ralegh, Greville, Wotton, Herbert and Milton. Throughout, readers are reminded that the consequences of the English reformations were as important as the better known influences of the Renaissance." - from the publisher

"This is the first major collection of essays to look at the literature of the entire Tudor period, from the reign of Henry VII to death of Elizabeth I. It pays particularly attention to the years before 1580. Those decades saw, amongst other things, the establishment of print culture and growth of a reading public; the various phases of the English Reformation and process of political centralization that enabled and accompanied them; the increasing emulation of Continental and classical literatures under the of humanism; the self-conscious emergence of English as a literary language and determined creation of a native literary canon; the beginnings of English empire and the consolidation of a sense of nationhood. However, study of Tudor literature prior to 1580 is not only of worth as a context, or foundation, for an Elizabethan 'golden age'. As this much-needed volume will show, it is also of artistic, intellectual, and cultural merit in its own right. Written by experts from Europe, North America, and the United Kingdom, the forty-four chapters in The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature recover some of the distinctive voices of sixteenth-century writing, its energy, variety, and inventiveness. As well as essays on well-known writers, such as Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt, the volume contains the first extensive treatment in print of some of the Tudor era's most original voices." - from the publisher

"Shakespeare is usually set apart from his contemporaries, in kind no less than quality. This book, the long-awaited final volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, sees Elizabethan drama as drawn together by a shared need to deal with contradictory pressures from heterogeneous audiences, censorious authorities, profit driven managers, and authors looking for classic status and social esteem. Hunter follows the compromises and contradictions of the Elizabethan repertory, examining how Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were able to move easily from vulgar realism to poetic transcendence." - from the publisher

"This Companion seeks to bridge the current gap between Shakespeare's poems and plays, as well as between his 'theatrical' and his 'poetical' achievements. Chapters discuss the Sonnets, individual narrative poems, the topic of poetry in the plays, the special contexts important for viewing 'Shakespearean poetry', and the afterlife of this topic. The book presents Shakespeare as a pioneering author of poems and plays, one who remains committed to the absolute intersection of the poetical with the theatrical within the English and European tradition on both stage and page." - from the publisher

"English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social and religious context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition. of the early seventeenth century set in its cultural and ideological context." - from the publisher

"This collection of fifteen essays by leading scholars examines the extraordinary diversity and richness of the writing produced in response to, and as part of, the upheaval in the religious, political and cultural life of the nation which constituted the English Revolution. The turmoil of the civil wars fought out from 1639 to 1651, the shock of the execution of Charles I, and the uncertainty of the succeeding period of constitutional experiment were enacted and refigured in writing which both shaped and was shaped by the tumultuous times. The various strategies of this battle of the books are explored through essays on the course of events, intellectual trends and the publishing industry; in discussions of canonical figures such as Milton, Marvell, Bunyan and Clarendon; and in accounts of women's writing and of fictional and non-fictional prose. A full chronology, detailed guides to further reading and a glossary are included." - from the publisher

"With reference to the present work, the Edinburgh Review eloquently observes, 'Mr Hazlitt possesses one noble quality at least for the office which he has chosen, in the intense admiration and love which he feels for the great authors on whose excellencies he chiefly dwells. His relish for their beauties is so keen, that while he describes them, the pleasures which they impart become almost palpable to the sense, and we seem, scarcely in a figure, to feast and banquet on their 'nectared sweets.' He introduces us almost corporally into the divine presence of the great of old time -- enables us to hear the living oracles of wisdom drop from their lips -- and makes us partakers, not only of those joys which they diffused, but of those which they felt in the inmost recesses of their souls. [...] His criticisms, while they extend our insight into the causes of poetical excellence, teach us, at the same time, more keenly to enjoy, and more fondly to revere it." - from the Advertisement

"Henry Hallam (1777-1859) was an Oxford-educated historian (and the father of Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam) who, with inherited wealth, was able to devote himself to writing Hallam's best-known work, the Constitutional History of England (1827), to the death of George II, became a work of great and prolonged influence. His last great work was An Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries (1837-9), the sweep of which covers not only creative literature but the literature of the classics, mathematics, theology, science, and, most notably, of philosophy and thought. More valuable than commonly credited, this is perhaps the last critical work to discuss Neo-Latin literature in detail in the context of a general study of European literature." - from the publisher

"The first formal biographical notice of Shakespeare was written fifty years after his death by Thomas Fuller, a clergyman whose most important work was The Church History of Britain. His final work, published posthumously, was the first biographical dictionary in English. Fuller’s History of the Worthies of England catalogued the significant features of every county in England, relying on comprehensive research (he was known as a “walking library”). He sought to enliven the entries of writers by naming and numbering their books. Fuller included Shakespeare among the notable authors of his native Warwickshire. This brief passage outlines Shakespeare’s contemporary reputation. He is compared to classical poets, including that “fine wag” Ovid (see items 2 and 3). In a notable nautical metaphor, he repeats an anecdote about the “wit combats” between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (see item 38). While the more learned and laborious Jonson is characterized as “solid, but slow,” Shakespeare is praised for the “quickness of his wit and invention” which can “turn with all tides.” The myth that Shakespeare lacked learning derives from Jonson’s memorial poem in the First Folio, where he refers to Shakespeare’s “small Latin, and less Greek”—although it is important to note that in Jonson’s estimation, no other writer could approach his own authoritative knowledge of the classics." - University of Iowa Libraries, "Making and Selling Shakespeare"

"Walton also made significant contributions to seventeenth-century life-writing throughout his career. His leisurely labours as a biographer seem to have grown out of his devotion to angling. It was probably as an angler that he made the acquaintance of Sir Henry Wotton, but it is clear that Walton had more than a love of fishing and a humorous temper to recommend him to the friendship of the accomplished ambassador. At any rate, Wotton, who had intended to write the life of John Donne, and had already corresponded with Walton on the subject, left the task to him. Walton had already contributed an elegy to the 1633 edition of Donne's poems, and he completed and published the life, much to the satisfaction of the most learned critics, in 1640. Sir Henry Wotton dying in 1639, Walton undertook his life also; it was finished in 1642 and published in 1651 as a preface to the volume Reliquiae Wottonianae. His life of Hooker was published in 1665, and his biography of George Herbert in 1670, the latter coinciding with a collected edition of Walton's biographical writings, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670, 1675). His life of Bishop Robert Sanderson appeared in 1678. All these subjects were endeared to the biographer by a certain gentleness of disposition and cheerful piety; three of them at least—Donne, Wotton and Herbert—were anglers. Walton studied these men's lives in detail, and provides many insights into their character." - from Wikipedia

"The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780 offers readers discussions of the entire range of literary expression from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century. In essays by thirty distinguished scholars, recent historical perspectives and new critical approaches and methods are brought to bear on the classic authors and texts of the period. Forgotten or neglected authors and themes, as well as new and emerging genres within the expanding marketplace for printed matter during the eighteenth century, receive special attention and emphasis. The volume's guiding purpose is to examine the social and historical circumstances within which literary production and imaginative writing take place in the period and to evaluate the enduring verbal complexity and cultural insights they articulate so powerfully." - from the publisher

"This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well as in the imaginative flight of its mock epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew." - from the publisher

"Since considerable latitude has been allowed to the writers of these volumes, I have felt free to discuss a number of the lesser known authors of my period with some fullness. The body of critical comment on Dryden is now formidable, and has increased notably in the past two decades; and the same is true, to a smaller extent, of Bunyan and Locke. Among the writers of Restoration drama, Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve have all been studied and discussed in considerable detail. But with the other dramatists, such as Shadwell, Lee, Otway, Southerne--and still more with such authors as John Banks, Mrs. Behn, Crowne, Durfey, or Ravenscroft--it is a very different story; and one is driven to conclude that their work is virtually ignored by most critics of Restoration drama. So, too, with the notable Restoration preachers, the writers of history and biography, the essayists, poets of the calibre of Cotton or Oldham (there is a distinct revival of interest in Rochester), and delightful eccentrics like John Aubrey and Walter Pope. It has seemed to me that, while it is not the business of a literary historian to seek to reanimate the dead, it is part of his function to call attention to writers who are being unduly neglected, and whose writing still has life and individuality." - from the preface

"For readers daunted by the formal structures and rhetorical sophistication of eighteenth-century English poetry, this introduction by John Sitter brings the techniques and the major poets of the period 1700-1785 triumphantly to life. Sitter begins by offering a guide to poetic forms ranging from heroic couplets to blank verse, then demonstrates how skilfully male and female poets of the period used them as vehicles for imaginative experience, feelings and ideas. He then provides detailed analyses of individual works by poets from Finch, Swift and Pope, to Gray, Cowper and Barbauld. An approachable introduction to English poetry and major poets of the eighteenth century, this book provides a grounding in poetic analysis useful to students and general readers of literature." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry analyzes major premises, preoccupations, and practices of English poets writing from 1700 to the 1790s. These specially commissioned essays avoid familiar categories and single-author approaches to look at the century afresh. Chapters consider such large poetic themes as nature, the city, political passions, the relation of death to desire and dreams, appeals to an imagined future, and the meanings of "sensibility." Other chapters explore historical developments such as the connection between poetic couplets and conversation, the conditions of publication, changing theories of poetry and imagination, growing numbers of women poets and readers, the rise of a self-consciously national tradition, and the place of lyric poetry in thought and practice. The essays are well supported by supplementary material including a chronology of the period and detailed guides to further reading. Altogether the volume provides an invaluable resource for scholars and students." - from the publisher

"This multifaceted picture of the British novel in its formative decades provides an indispensable guide for students of the eighteenth-century novel, and its place within the culture of its time. Drawing on new research in social and political history, the twelve contributors to this Companion challenge and refine the traditional view of the novel's origins and purposes. Sentimental and Gothic fiction, and fiction by women, are discussed, alongside detailed readings of work by Defoe, Swift, Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sterne, Smollett and Burney." - Publisher's description

"Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the "modern" subjects and objects privileged by "rise of the novel" scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries." - from the publisher

"In this study intended for general readers, eminent critic Patricia Meyer Spacks provides a fresh, engaging account of the early history of the English novel. Novel Beginnings departs from the traditional, narrow focus on the development of the realistic novel to emphasize the many kinds of experimentation that marked the genre in the eighteenth century before its conventions were firmly established in the nineteenth. Treating well-known works like Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy in conjunction with less-familiar texts such as Sarah Fielding's The Cry (a kind of hybrid novel and play) and Jane Barker's A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (a novel of adventure replete with sentimental verse and numerous subnarratives), the book evokes the excitement of a multifaceted and unpredictable process of growth and change." - from the publisher

"What makes it possible for self-interest, cruelty and violence to become part of the benevolent, compassionate ideology of eighteenth-century sensibility? This book explores forms of emotional response, including sympathy, tears, swoons and melancholia through a range of eighteenth-century literary, philosophical and scientific texts." - from the publisher

"Susan Whyman draws on a hidden world of previously unknown letter writers to explore bold new ideas about the history of writing, reading and the novel. Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, The Pen and the People will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people. Based on over thirty-five previously unknown letter collections, it tells the stories of workers and the middling sort -- a Yorkshire bridle maker, a female domestic servant, a Derbyshire wheelwright, an untrained woman writing poetry and short stories, as well as merchants and their families. Their ordinary backgrounds and extraordinary writings challenge accepted views that popular literacy was rare in England before 1800. This democratization of letter writing could never have occurred without the development of the Royal Mail. Drawing on new information gleaned from personal letters, Whyman reveals how the Post Office had altered the rhythms of daily life long before the nineteenth century. As the pen, the post, and the people became increasingly connected, so too were eighteenth-century society and culture slowly and subtly transformed." - from the publisher

"With the growth of efficient postal service in England and the stimulus of a growing tradition of informal prose among eighteenth-century men of leisure, the intimate letter reached unprecedented literary heights as the exemplary form of the period. Considered here are the striking and diverse qualities both of the art and the personalities of the great letter-writers: Swift, Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Richardson, the Earl of Chesterfield, Johnson, Sterne, Gray, Walpole, Burke, Cowper, Gibbon, and Boswell." - from the publisher

"The authors represented in this volume include Congreve (The Way of the World), Gay (The Beggar's Opera), Dryden (Absalom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe), Swift, Pope, Boswell, and Samuel Johnson." - from the publisher

"In the first decade of the eighteenth century, only two women published collections of verse. By the 1790s, more than thirty had done so. Yet, in the two intervening centuries, most of that verse has disappeared from view--now either ignored or forgotten. This delightful anthology takes us back to Augustan England, introducing over one hundred of these lost poets from Lady Mary Chudleigh and Octavia Walsh to Mary Locke and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. Their poetry speaks with vigor and immediacy, in a range of moods from the resentful and melancholic to the humorous and exuberant, as they unveil their individual worlds to us. They came from all levels of society--including washerwomen and duchesses--and from both the town and country. The volume reveals that as eighteenth-century women poets gained confidence, their writing eventually spanned a variety of poetic forms and encompassed both public and private topics. Eighteenth-Century Women Poets offers a compelling reassessment of a neglected aspect of eighteenth-century literature." - from the publisher

"John Aubrey was a modest man, a self-styled antiquarian and the man who invented modern biography. His ‘lives’ of the prominent figures of his generation and the Elizabethan era, including Shakespeare, Milton and Sir Walter Raleigh, have been plundered by historians for centuries for their frankness and fascinating detail. Collected here are all of Aubrey’s biographical writings, a series of unforgettable portraits of the characters of his day, still more alive and kicking than in any conventional work of history." - publisher description of the Vintage Books edition

"Generations of readers have found Pepys' diaries one of the best ways to vicariously experience the tumultuous world of seventeenth century London, the time of Restoration, the Plague, and the Great Fire. The short Pepys recreates this world for readers daunted by the complete multi-volume set of diaries. Containing about one-third of the original, the abridgment is full enough to give us just the essence but the detail of Pepys' daily life." - from the publisher

"Since its publication at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Earl of Clarendon's history of the English Civil War has remained one of the most important sources for our understanding of the events that changed the course of British history. Clarendon held the offices of Lord High Chancellor of England and Chancellor of the University of Oxford; he began his great work after the Restoration of Charles II at the behest of the King himself." "Written by one of the closest advisers to Charles I and Charles II, Clarendon's History contains a remarkably frank account of the inadequacies of royalist policy-making as well as an astute analysis of the principles and practice of government. Clarendon chronicles in absorbing detail the factions and intrigues, the rise of Cromwell and the death of Charles I, the bloody battles and the eventual Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 after the Interregnum. Paul Seaward's new selection includes all the famous passages but also provides a readable narrative account of the Civil War and links Clarendon's personal story to the greater struggle going on around him." - publisher description of the Oxford University Press edition

"Edited by George Birkbeck Hill. With brief memoir of Birkbeck Hill by Harold Spencer Scott." -title page

"Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), alternatively known by the shorter title Lives of the Poets, is a work by Samuel Johnson comprising short biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets, most of whom lived during the eighteenth century. These were arranged, approximately, by date of death. [...] In mentioning this reading of Johnson's Lives at the start of his own article in The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, Greg Clingham describes the topics covered there as 'like a list of most of the important issues in literary history during the years 1600–1781' as well as something like a social, philosophical and political history of that era. But Philip Smallwood, commenting on the Lives in The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800, nuances this by pointing out that Johnson did not set out to produce a literary history. His main preoccupation is with how literary work is in a state of flux and advanced by individuals writing within a historical context. Consideration of their lives is therefore justified as it helps the reader in a different time to appreciate the significance of the works described." - from Wikipedia

"The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is a comprehensive reference resource covering British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements from the late 18th century to the early 19th century, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. This three-volume collection showcases over 275 entries written by leading international scholars, providing students and researchers with an authoritative overview of Romanticism. Entries explore key authors and their works, literary invention and variation, major themes, new developments, and experimentation with form, within the context of literary genre and sub-genre. Each volume is carefully organized and fully cross-referenced, enabling easier researching. With its cohesive organization and in-depth coverage of Romantic genres, this encyclopedia sets a new standard for scholarship in the field, and will be an indispensible resource for all students and researchers of Romanticism."--Publisher's description.

"First Published in 1992, this encyclopedia is designed to survey the social, cultural and intellectual climate of English Romanticism from approximately the 1780s and the French Revolution to the 1830s and the Reform Bill. Focussing on ‘the spirit of the age’, the book deals with the aesthetic, scientific, socioeconomic – indeed the human – environment in which the Romantics flourished. The books considers poets, playwrights and novelists; critics, editors and booksellers; painters, patrons and architects; as well as ideas, trends, fads, and conventions, the familiar and the newly discovered. The book will be of use for everyone from undergraduate English students, through to thesis-driven graduate students to teaching faculty and scholars." - from the publisher

"From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle Heloise, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of sex appeal or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age."

"From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels-poets, novelists, philosophers--who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time. When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations. At the heart of this inspiring book is the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will." - from the publisher

Librarian's note: These first two books serve as a reminder that Romanticism was a transnational movement taking place in many different countries throughout Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.

"The Romantic period was one of the most creative, intense and turbulent periods of English literature, an age marked by revolution, reaction, and reform in politics, and by the invention of imaginative literature in its distinctively modern form. This History presents an engaging account of six decades of literary production around the turn of the nineteenth century. Reflecting the most up-to-date research, the essays are designed both to provide a narrative of Romantic literature, and to offer new and stimulating readings of the key texts. One group of essays addresses the various locations of literary activity - both in England and, as writers developed their interests in travel and foreign cultures, across the world. A second set of essays traces how texts responded to great historical and social change. With a comprehensive bibliography, timeline and index, this volume will be an important resource for research and teaching in the field." - from the publisher

"For the first time in this innovative reference book the Romantic Age is surveyed across all aspects of British culture, rather than in literary or artistic terms alone. The Companion's two-part structure presents forty-two essays on major topics, by leading international experts, cross-referenced to an extensive alphabetical reference section covering all the principal figures, events, and movements in the broad culture of the period. Aimed at students and general readers as well as scholars, the essays constitute an accessible, pluralistic, and modern social history of the epoch; the alphabetical entries can either be used alongside them, for deeper information on specific subjects, or as a free-standing reference tool." - from the publisher

"Until now there has been no concerted attempt to represent to students of Romanticism the full range of conflicting forces responsible for its dynamic literature. The eleven original essays that make up this volume make a significant contribution to our understanding of the period, providing readers with clear and coherent access to the historical roots, intellectual ferment and cultural range of British Romanticism. It includes a chronology of major publications and events, and an extensive guide to further reading." - from the publisher

"Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history. Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this era. Corrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sister. Celebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampire. Engagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work." - from the publisher

"The best way to learn about Romantic poetry is to plunge in and read a few Romantic poems. This book guides the new reader through this experience, focusing on canonical authors - Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Blake and Shelley - whilst also including less familiar figures as well. Each chapter explains the history and development of a genre or sets out an important context for the poetry, with a wealth of practical examples. Michael Ferber emphasizes connections between poets as they responded to each other and to great literary, social and historical changes around them. A unique appendix resolves most difficulties new readers of works from this period might face: unfamiliar words, unusual word order, the subjunctive mood and meter. This enjoyable and stimulating book is an ideal introduction to some of the most powerful and pleasing poems in the English language, written in one of the greatest periods in English poetry." - from the publisher

"While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period's social, political and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms and audiences." - from the publisher

"At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the literary lecture arrived on London's cultural scene as an influential critical medium and popular social event. It flourished for two decades in the hands of the period's most prominent lecturers: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, Thomas Campbell, and William Hazlitt. Lecturers aimed to shape auditors' reading habits, burnish their own professional profiles, and establish a literary canon. Auditors wielded their own considerable influence, since their sustained approbation was necessary to a lecturer's success, and independent series could collapse midway if attendance waned. Two chapters are therefore devoted to the auditors, whose creative responses to what they heard often constituted cultural works in their own right. Auditors wrote poems and letters about lecture performances, acted as patrons to lecturers, and hosted dinners and conversation parties that followed these events. Prominent auditors included John Keats, Mary Russell Mitford, Henry Crabb Robinson, Catherine Maria Fanshawe, and Lady Charlotte Bury. The Romantic public literary lecture is a fascinating cultural phenomenon in its own right, but understanding the medium has significant implications for some of the period's most0important literary criticism, such as Coleridge's readings of Shakespeare and Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (1818). The book's two main aims are to chart the emergence of the literary lecture as a popular medium and to develop a critical approach to these events by drawing on an interdisciplinary discussion about how to treat historical speaking performances." - from the publisher

"How did the buying and collecting of books figure in the lives and works of the Romantics, those supposed apostles of spiritualized poetic genius? Why was book collecting controversial during the period, and what role has book collecting played in the history of queer phobia? The Queer Bookishness of Romanticism: Ornamental Community addresses such questions about the bookish dimension of Romanticism and its Victorian aftermath. The analysis focuses on the bookish proclivities of the Ladies of Llangollen, the "ornamental gentlemen" and bibliographer Thomas F. Dibdin, the essayist Charles Lamb, and the Victorian forgers Thomas J. Wise and Harry Buxton Forman. In the process, this book uncovers surprising connections between literature and sexuality, bookishness and queerness, and forgery and sexuality." - from the publisher

"This new edition of the groundbreaking Romanticism: An Anthology is the only book of its kind to contain complete texts of a wide range of Romantic works, including Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Urizen; Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798); Wordsworth's Two-Part Prelude; early and revised versions of Coleridge's 'The Eolian Harp', 'This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison', 'Frost at Midnight', and 'The Ancient Mariner'; Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion and Adonais; Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto III and Don Juan Dedication and Cantos I and II; and Keats's Odes, the two Hyperions, Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes. It also carries explanatory annotations and author headnotes. Updated to incorporate the latest scholarly findings, it remains the essential text on Romanticism." - from the publisher

"A responsive, refreshed, and media-rich revision of the best-selling anthology in the field.The most trusted anthology for complete works and helpful editorial apparatus. The Tenth Edition supports survey and period courses with NEW complete major works, NEW contemporary writers, and dynamic and easy-to-access digital resources. NEW video modules help introduce students to literature in multiple exciting ways. These innovations make the Norton Anthology an even better teaching tool for instructors and, as ever, unmatched value for students." - from the publisher

"Many readers still associate the Romantic era with six major poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Blake. But recently, critics have challenged this all male canon, pointing out that during the Romantic period women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were among the most highly respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. In fact, Hemams was one of the best-selling authors of the nineteenth century, and Baillie was the foremost playwright of her time.In British Women Poets of the Romantic Era Paula R. Feldman introduces modern readers to the range and diversity of women's poetic expression, making available more texts by more women poets of the Romantic era than have ever been collected in a single book in the twentieth century. Here are sonnets, odes, elegies, satires, songs, pastorals, anti-pastorals, love lyrics, epistles, long narrative poems, ballads, riddles, and a portion of an epic. Working-class poets, such as Christian Milne and Isabel Pagan, take their place among aristocrats, such as Lady Byron and Carolina, Baroness Nairne. Reflecting the realities of women's careers, poems that circulated in song and manuscript, rather than as published books, are also present, along with poems by writers best known today for their novels, such as Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe. Feldman provides detailed introductions for each of the sixty-two poets, chronicling their lives, poetic careers, and critical reputations. This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contribution but also changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period." - from the publisher

"The Spirit of the Age (full title The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits) is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly The New Monthly Magazine in 1824, the essays were collected with several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825. The Spirit of the Age was one of Hazlitt's most successful books. It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece, even "the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism." Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays. His artistic and critical sensibility, however, infused his prose style—Hazlitt was later judged to be one of the greatest of English prose stylists as well—enabling his appreciation of portrait painting to help him bring his subjects to life. His experience as a literary, political, and social critic contributed to Hazlitt's solid understanding of his subjects' achievements, and his judgements of his contemporaries were later often deemed to have held good after nearly two centuries." - from Wikipedia

"A Collection of Novels has a better chance of giving pleasure than of commanding respect. Books of this description are condemned by the grave, and despised by the fastidious; but their leaves are seldom found unopened, and they occupy the parlour and the dressing-room while productions of higher name are often gathering dust upon the shelf. It might not perhaps be difficult to show that this species of composition is entitled to a higher rank than has been generally assigned it. Fictitious adventures, in one form or other, have made a part of the polite literature of every age and nation. These have been grafted upon the actions of their heroes; they have been interwoven with their mythology; they have been moulded upon the manners of the age,--and, in return, have influenced the manners of the succeeding generation by the sentiments they have infued and the sensibilities they have excited." - from ALB's essay "On the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing"

"The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars." - from the publisher

"Thirty leading Victorianists from around the world collaborate here in a multidimensional analysis of the breadth and sweep of modern Britain's longest, unruliest literary epoch." "Its topical spectrum, precision of focus, and accessible style keep the book available for ready consultation, while an index and network of cross-references encourage further study. At the same time, when read sequentially the book renders a textured and polyphonic image, by diverse hands exemplifying diverse standpoints, of the Victorian imagination: a manifold cultural force that notoriously eludes near summary, yet bequeathed to our own day a recognizable tradition with which we are destined to struggle - as scholars, as modern people - for some time to come." - from the publisher

"In The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, a series of specially commissioned essays examine the work of Charles Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, and other canonical writers, as well as that of such writers as Olive Schreiner, Wilkie Collins, and H. Rider Haggard, whose work has recently attracted new attention from scholars and students. The collection combines the literary study of the novel as a form with analysis of the material aspects of its readership and production, and a series of thematic and contextual perspectives that examine Victorian fiction in the light of social and cultural concerns relevant both to the period itself and to the direction of current literary and cultural studies. Contributors engage with topics such as industrial culture, religion and science and the broader issues of the politics of gender, sexuality and race. The Companion includes a chronology and a comprehensive guide to further reading." - from the publisher

"How to Read the Victorian Novel provides a unique introduction to the genre. Using examples from the classics, like The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, and Middlemarch, it demonstrates just how unfamiliar their familiarity is. The book attempts to break free of the sense that the Victorian novel is somehow old-fashioned, moralizing, and formally careless by emphasizing the complexity, difficulty, and rare pleasures of the Victorian writers' strenuous efforts both to entertain and to teach; to create serious "art" and to appeal to wide audiences; to respond both to the demands of publishing and also to their own rich imaginative engagement with a world heading into modernity at full speed. Broad in its scope, the text surveys a wide variety of literary types and explores the cultural and historical developments of the novel form itself." - from the publisher

"This book continues the story of English literature through most of the Victorian period — a period that in religion and politics, science and technology, social life and its physical environment, witnessed the often painful development of modern England, A population-explosion, hurried progress in education, and a massive increase in the reading public were met by a literary output of unprecedented variety and richness. In architecture and the visual arts there was an equal surge of productivity, which affected literature most notably through the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Literature is here taken to include not only traditional genres such as poetry, drama, and history, but also some scientific and technical writing, art criticism and religious controversy, biography, autobiography, travel books, and books for children. Over 170 authors are discussed. The whole field is surveyed in the light of present-day scholarship, but in the context of its contemporary background, and against such classical and other literary precedents as were still a potent influence on authors’ minds." - from the publisher

"Presents selections from such authors as Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and George Meredith." - from the publisher

"Nineteenth-Century Women Poets is a major new anthology, selecting widely from writings produced in a period that has traditionally been associated with relatively few eminent female poets. Opening with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's petition to William Wilberforce and ending with the myth-making Irish writers of the Celtic revival, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions. The anthology presents the work of over one hundred women writers. Besides featuring distinguished middle-class poets such as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the collection presents work by authors such as Maria Jane Jewsbury, Augusta Webster, and Michael Field, whose significance is only now becoming apparent. It achieves range and depth by reprinting poems by working-class, colonial, and political poets, in addition to very substantial selections from the work of major figures. The collection draws on first editions wherever possible.The chronological span of the anthology provides a unique perspective on women's poetry from the late-Romantic period to the Victorian fin-de-siecle. The editorial commentary and headnotes supply biographical details, document the activities and publications of individual poets, examine the political formations and cultural groupings to which these writers belonged, and describe the print media which made the development of their work possible, in particular the minority journals that allowed them a voice." - from the publisher

"This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets. Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home,the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana." - from the publisher

"The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate. This volume opens up, in new and innovative ways, a range of dimensions, some familiar and some more obscure, of late Victorian and modern literature and culture, primarily in British contexts. Late Victorian into Modern emphasizes the in-between: the gradual changeover from one period to the next. The volume examines shared developments, points out continuities rather than ruptures, and explores and exploits an understanding of the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries as a cultural moment in which new knowledges were forming with particular speed and intensity. The organizing principle of this book is to retain a key focus on literary texts, broadly understood to include familiar categories of genre as well as extra-textual elements such as press and publishing history, performance events and visual culture, while remaining keenly attentive to the inter-relations between text and context in the period. Individual chapters explore such topics as Celticism, the New Woman, popular fictions, literatures of empire, aestheticism, periodical culture, political formations, avant-garde poetics, and theatricality."

"Lehan's book provides readers with an illuminating and readable comprehensive intellectual and literary history of the major American, British, and Continental novels of Realism and Naturalism from 1850 to 1950. He offers readers a new way of reading these novels-working outward from the text to forms of historical representation. In this way, literary naturalism can be seen as a narrative mode that creates its own reality separate from that of other narrative modes. Employing this strategy, Lehan contends, readers will find a spectrum of meaning in these works that allows and encourages intertextuality-one novel talking or responding to another-for example, Zola's Nana to Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Zola's L'Assomoir to Sinclair's The Jungle. The range of novelists and sub genres is staggering-Lehan studies the gothic novel, the urban novel, the detective novel, the novel of imperial adventure, the western novel, the noir novel, and the novels of utopia and distopia."

"Situated between the Victorians and Modernism, the fin de siècle is an exciting and rewarding period to study. In the literature and art of the 1890s, the processes of literary and cultural change can be seen in action. In this, more than any previous decade, literature was an active and controversial participant within debates over morality, aesthetics, politics and science, as Victorian certainties began to break down. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker and Olive Schreiner were among the most prominent, occasionally even notorious, writers and artists of the period, challenging establishment values and producing a distinctive literature of their own. This volume includes the main currents of radical and innovative thinking in the period, as well as the attempts to resist them. It will be of great interest to students of Victorian and twentieth-century literature, art and cultural history." - from the publisher

"First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism and introduced the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Arthur Symons’s interest in writers such as Verlaine and Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature, but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as James Joyce, George Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for more than 50 years. It includes an introduction, chronology, and notes, together with appendices presenting the full text of Symons’ essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” and a selection of his translations of French poetry." - description of Carcanet Press edition

"This major and acclaimed study of the symbolist tradition in England focuses on the years 1850 to 1900 and discusses the poetry of such as William Morris, O'Shaughnessy, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Wilde and Yeats, paintings by Holman Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, and critical works by Keble, Ruskin, Carlyle, Arnold, Pater and Arthur Symons. This volume considers the changes from romantic symbol through Victorian 'type' and 'emblem' to late romantic image. This study of both literature and the visual arts is comparative in nature, attempting to establish an English symbolist tradition as part of an international development linking the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published by Cambridge in 1988, Lother Hönnighausen's book includes illustrations and a survey of critical works, defining major research issues and offering suggestions for other work." - from the publisher

"In a narrative combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme, the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. Through the lens of symbolism, Candida Smith focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world.Mallarme's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result." - from the publisher

"Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe." - from the publisher

"Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners makes grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with Classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of Decadence on cinema and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde." - from the publisher

"The meaning of decadence varies with context, depending on what (or who) is understood to have declined, decayed, or degenerated. These negative meanings are familiar from history (the decline and fall of Rome), sociology (the decay of communities), morality (the degeneration of values), and more, including such popular conceptions of decadence as excess and corruption. At the same time, all of this negative decadence has found positive cultural expression, principally in literature, through the work of such celebrated nineteenth-century decadents as Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and many others. This volume explores the kind of literary expression Baudelaire gave to decadence in the mid-nineteenth century and Wilde at the fin de siècle by focusing on additional critical periods, such as classical antiquity, various ages of empire, the interwar era in the twentieth century, and contemporary times, as well as by examining key places-France, Belgium, Britain, Italy, Germany, the Nordic nations, Russia and Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan-and such genres as the novel, the short story, drama, the essay, prose poetry, and film. The volume also considers decadence more broadly as a culture not limited to literature by considering its manifestations in such material forms as book design, fashion, interior decoration, and architecture, as well as through the experiential register of the senses: decadent vision, sound, smell, taste, and touch are all reflected, respectively, in painting, music, perfume, cuisine, and feeling. Finally, the volume explores the theoretical resonance of decadence in such fields as theology, science, ecology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and politics."

"The early 21st Century: a gilded age of pious guilt, poison nostalgia, environmental collapse, unchecked pandemics, corporate franchises, workshopped creativity and personal brands. Standing against the Neo-Passeist tide, Neo-Decadence presents a total reformulation of everyday life. What is the vertical table? Why is a sex helmet indispensable for all assignations? What is the proper spirit of electronic gaming? Covering fashion, cooking, architecture, occultism, poetry, gardening, and other areas of concern to all young people, the present volume is the ONLY resource for those wishing to shrug off the cerements of late capitalist literature and art. If you've ever wanted to proudly commit commercial suicide while serving your own head on a plate as an offering to your inner daemon, consult this collection of manifestos-as much a personal style guide as it is a declaration of uncompromising aesthetic war." - from the publisher

"This wide-ranging anthology showcases for the first time the short story as the most attractive genre for British writers who experimented with Decadent themes and styles. From familiar writers such as Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde to less known writers such as Charles Ricketts, Vincent O’Sullivan and Una Ashworth Taylor the 36 stories and 2 parodies demonstrate ideas of class, gender, sexuality, and science as well as the Gothic, social satire, Symbolist fantasy, fairy tale, Naturalism/Realism, Impressionism, erotica, and the scientific romance. The selections represent the important role that the Little Magazine culture played in the unprecedented explosion of the Decadent short story in the 1890s. A full introductory essay sets the scene, while an introduction and endnotes for each story and explanatory material at the end of the book make this anthology stand out." - from the publisher

"While Englishmen were dying by the thousands on the battlefields of Europe, their friends and relations on the home front were reading books of humor, tales of espionage and adventure, colorful romances, and historical swashbucklers. Harold Orel's penetrating book explains why escapist fiction dominated the popular literary market in England throughout the Great War. A large factor, he shows, was the view of publishers, reviewers, booksellers, libraries, literary groups, and the general reading public that escapist fiction was a useful diversion from the inescapable horrors of war." "Orel begins with a survey of the British literary world and its attitudes toward the novel at the outbreak of the war. Within a broad social, cultural, and economic context he depicts the "fiction industry" at a time of extraordinary upheaval, before the triumph of Modernism, when the attitudes and esthetics of writers, the tastes of readers, and the economics of the marketplace were undergoing rapid transformation." "Subsequent chapters offer detailed studies of fifteen of the most touted novels of the period and the ways they reflected--or, more often, failed to reflect--the radical changes taking place as they were being written." "The writers examined include George Moore, Norman Douglas, Frank Swinnerton, Compton Mackenzie, Mary Webb, Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, John Buchan, Alec Waugh, H.G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. Many of their novels during these years avoid mention of the war that was reshaping their world, or allude to it only obliquely. The book concludes with a review of changes in the publishing world in 1918, the last year of the Great War." "In its comprehensive coverage of a wide range of once popular but now neglected novels, Orel's authoritative study fills a gap in the cultural and literary history of early twentieth-century England."

"' Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial is Boehmer's most challenging and rewarding book to date. Her encyclopaedic knowledge and sensitivity to textual detail, which were the hallmarks of her successful Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford 1995), combine excitingly with her impressive theoretical dexterity and ambition. Certainly this is the most conceptually sophisticated of her critical works, one which makes a significant and ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of an important period of burgeoning anti-colonial resistance.' -John McLeod, University of Leeds'Inspiring... meticulously researched and gracefully written... Throughout the book Boehmer's commitment to historical occasion and accuracy acts as a necessary counterweight to some of the abstract excesses of postcolonial theory, enabling her to be conceptually adventurous but historically responsible.' -John McLeod, University of LeedsThis book explores the political and textual interrelations which linked anti-colonialists, nationalists, and modernists in the years 1890-1920. Focusing on both canonical and less well-known figures, and interconnecting Europe, India, and South Africa, the book considers how resistance to domination and nationalist processes of 'making new' emerged not only in reaction to the colonizer but due to the interaction between colonial margins at the time." - from the publisher

"The Great War of 1914-18 continues to fascinate readers and writers. This book aims to explore the different ways in which this war has featured both as a genre and as a theme in British literature of the past century; it asks what actually is the literature of the Great War, and looks at different ways in which people have read this literature, reacted to it and used it." - from the publisher

"The Great War stimulated a sudden growth in the novel industry. Well known writers such as Mrs Humphry Ward and Edith Wharton found themselves jostled by authors like Ruby M. Ayres, Kate Finzi, and Olive Dent. The trauma of the war continued to reverberate through much of the fiction published in the years that followed its inglorious end. Women's Fiction and the Great War challenges current thinking about women's responses to the First World War, questioning, even as it supports, the categorization of 'women's writing'. This volume considers some of the best known, and some of the least known, women writers on whose work the war left its shadow. The writing of some of the most famous modernist women writers - including Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and HD - is reassessed as war literature, and the work of long-neglected authors such as Vernon Lee, Frances Bellerby, and Mary Butts is at last given serious attention." - from the publisher

"The art of the anthologist is the art of the host: his tact is exerted in choosing a congenial group; making them feel comfortable and at ease; keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one into some characteristic and felicitous vein. I think I can offer you, in this parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the most genuine sort; and having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more. But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do, just why this particular company has been called together. My intention is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to be frank, a secret ambition that a book of this sort may even be used as a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to the student that as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos, politics, and the picturesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a work of art. And I would call the reader's attention to this: that the greater number of these essays were written not by retired æsthetes, but by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press. The names of some of the most widely bruited essayists of our day are absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include material less generally known." - from the preface

Librarian's note: The familiar, mostly un-modernistic style of these essays captures the manner of Edwardian literature rather well.

"The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent. Its poets mark the conflict in ways that are both intensely personal and as enduring as any monument. Their lines have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and consequences of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets and offers a fresh assessment of the work on the centenary of the Great War's outbreak. Focusing on the poets themselves, the book is organized by writer, not theme or chronology. It offers generous selections from the celebrated soldier-poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke, whilst also incorporating less well-known writing by civilian and women poets. It also includes two previously unpublished poems by Ivor Gurney. A general introduction charts the history of the war poets' reception and challenges prevailing myths about the war poets' progress from idealism to bitterness. The work of each poet is prefaced with a biographical account that sets the poems in their historical context." - from the publisher

"The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms situates literary modernisms and the modernist arts in a series of unfolding relations with mass society and popular culture in both national and transnational settings. Containing fifty-six specially commissioned essays, it updates and extends the scope and depth of previous synoptic guides, bringing together new approaches to the more obvious themes of modernist studies as well as new research on the variety of cultural, aesthetic, and geographical factors that were intrinsic to the creation of modernism. The contributors draw upon a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and new methodologies in order to take account of the development of revisionist modernist studies over the past three decades. Two innovative features of the Handbook are its focus upon the cross-media and international character of modernism. A number of the essays examine visual culture and other media in order to delineate the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural formations linking the innovations and experiments of literary modernism with work in other arts and media. Others seek to analyse how Anglo-American and European models were inflected in a different temporal frame and in quite distinct geographical contexts. The Handbook is divided into six sections in order to reflect changed critical perspectives upon modernism's formal innovation and experiment, to foreground the relation of literature and the other arts, and to understand these in appropriate intellectual, social, and geocultural settings. The received canon is therefore revisited and ‘made new’ as the varying aspects of metropolitan, regional, national, and transnational modernisms come into view." - from the publisher

"The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority. Nicholls introduces a wealth of literary experimentation, beginning with Baudelaire and Mallarmé and moving forward to the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, histories that allow Anglo-American Modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light. In revealing Modernism's broad and varied terrain, Nicholls evokes the richness of a cultural moment that continues to shape our own." - from the publisher

"More than a century after its beginnings, modernism still has the power to shock, alienate, or challenge readers. This introduction explains in a readable, lively style how modernism emerged, how it is defined, and how it developed in different forms and genres. Pericles Lewis offers students a survey of literature and art in England, Ireland, and Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Illustrated with modernist art and featuring suggestions for further study, this is the ideal introduction to understanding and enjoying modernist literature and art." - from the publisher

"In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ten eminent scholars from Britain and the United States offer timely new appraisals of the revolutionary cultural transformations of the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapters on the major literary genres, intellectual, political and institutional contexts, film and the visual arts, provide both close analyses of individual works and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A chronology and guide to further reading supply valuable orientation for the study of Modernism. Readers will be able to use the book at once as a standard work of reference and as a stimulating source of compelling new readings of works by writers and artists from Joyce and Woolf to Stein, Picasso, Chaplin, H. D. and Freud, and many others. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating re-evaluation." - from the publisher

"Exploring the transnational dimension of literary modernism and its increasing centrality to our understanding of 20th-century literary culture, Modernism in a Global Context surveys the key issues and debates central to the 'global turn' in contemporary Modernist Studies. Topics covered include: - Transnational exchanges between Western and non-Western literary cultures - Imperialism and the Modernism - Cosmopolitanism and postcolonial literatures - Global literary institutions - from the Little Magazine to the Nobel Prize - Mass media - photography, cinema, and radio broadcasting in the modernist age Exploring the work of writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Wole Soyinka, Salman Rushdie and critics such as Edward Said, Pascale Casanova, Paul Gilroy, and Gayatri Spivak amongst many others, the book also includes a comprehensive annotated guide to further reading and online resources." - from the publisher

"In this major new book, Vincent Sherry reveals a fresh continuity in literary history. He traces the idea of decadence back to key events from the failures of the French Revolution to the cataclysm of the Great War. This powerful work of literary criticism and literary history encompasses a rich trajectory that begins with an exposition of the English Romantic poets and ends with a re-evaluation of modernists as varied as W.B. Yeats, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Rebecca West, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and, centrally, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Sherry's hugely ambitious study will be essential reading for anyone working in modernist studies and twentieth-century literature more generally." - from the publisher

"This book argues that the history of literary modernism is inextricably connected with naturalism. Simon Joyce traces a complex response among aesthetes to the work of Emile Zola at the turn of the century, recovering naturalism's assumed compatibility with impressionism as a central cause of their ambivalence. Highlighting a little-studied strain of reflexive naturalism in which Zola's mode of analytical observation is turned upon the authors themselves, Joyce suggests that the confluence of naturalism and impressionism formed the precondition for so-called stream-of-consciousness writing. This style served to influence not only the work of canonical modernists such as Joyce and Woolf but also that of lesser-known writers such as George Moore, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton." - from the publisher

"The period between the World Wars was one of the richest and most inventive in the long history of British literature. Interwar literature, David Trotter argues, stood apart by virtue of the sheer intelligence of the enquiries it undertook into the technological mediation of experience. After around 1925, literary works began to portray communication by telephone, television, radio, and sound cinema--and to examine the sorts of behavior made possible for the first time by virtual interaction. And they filled up, too, with the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the new synthetic and semi-synthetic materials that were reshaping everyday modern life. New media and new materials gave writers a fresh opportunity to reimagine both how lives might be lived and how literature might be written. Today, Trotter observes, such material and immaterial mediations have become even more decisive. Communications technology is an attitude before it is a machine or a set of codes. It is an idea about the prosthetic enhancement of our capacity to communicate. The writers who first woke up to this fact were not postwar, postmodern, or post-anything else: some of the best of them lived and wrote in the British Isles in the period between the World Wars. In defining what they achieved, this book creates a new literary canon of works distinguished formally and thematically by their alertness to the implications of new media and new materials." - from the publisher

"A Very Great Profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katharine in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day ("Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition… She lived at home") and Laura, the heroine of Brief Encounter, women whose lives and habits were wonderfully recorded in the fiction of the time. Drawing on the novels to illuminate themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and ‘surplus’ women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, though their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars." - from the publisher

"The literature of World War II has emerged as an accomplished, moving, and challenging body of work, produced by writers as different as Norman Mailer and Virginia Woolf, Primo Levi and Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and W. H. Auden. This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of the international literatures of the war: both those works that recorded or reflected experiences of the war as it happened, and those that tried to make sense of it afterwards. It surveys the writing produced in the major combatant nations (Britain and the Commonwealth, the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and the USSR), and explores its common themes. With its chronology and guide to further reading, it will be an invaluable source of information and inspiration for students and scholars of modern literature and war studies." - from the publisher

"Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, film, and book-related play-activity in relation to values systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective. the development of sophistication, retention and loss of pre-war attitudes and their post-war fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached the USA, and vice versa, and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Question of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-division, ageism, class, race and gender awareness are explored." - from the publisher

"This collection of short stories written by women for whom war was a way of life includes some of the best known writers of that generation such as Elizabeth Bowen, Doris Lessing, Stevie Smith and Elizabeth Taylor. The stories reveal the isolation of the women who felt left behind." "Considered the often overlooked side of World War II, offering twenty-seven stories by women writers that render a sensitive portrait of life on the home front and the struggles to keep homes, families, and relationships alive." - from the publisher

"This is the definitive account of the literary phenomenon that was the Angry Young Men, from one of the first writers to be hailed as such - Colin Wilson, whose groundbreaking work The Outsider, along with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, marked its start." "This is not a critic's book, but a writer's story of what it was to be at the heart of this extraordinary milieu. It is a broad and deep exploration of the lives and work of those involved; of the bleak 1950s London that they burst upon, how they changed it and were changed by it; and how all too often meteoric rise was followed by decline, decay and disappointment." "It features a cast of talents great and small, raging egos, bohemians, cynics, romantics, lovers and drinkers; including (among many others) Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, J.P. Donleavy, Iris Murdoch, Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe and Arnold Wesker." - from the publisher

"There may be more important literary movements than the Angry Young Men but there can be few as consciously (or unconsciously) entertaining. The Angry Young Men were an absurdly diverse group, often wildly at odds and, indeed, often wholly unacquainted with each other. This cavalcade of misunderstandings, wild statements, mediocrity and genuine achievement can now be seen as the first and most perfect example of how the media both helps and ruins literature. Humphrey Carpenter's extremely funny new book celebrates the strange group of varying talents who at different times were believed to be Angry Young Men." - from the publisher

"Assessing the state of post-war literature and its relation to English culture and society overall, Brannigan (English, Trinity College, Dublin) discusses conservatism, class, feminism, homosexuality, colonialism and its legacy, and the West Indian Literary Renaissance. He gives particular attention to the contributions of the Angry Young Men, the challenge that working-class writing presented to the affluent society, and post-colonial representations of England." - from the publisher

"The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media, and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American Boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come." - from the publisher

"Postmodern realist fiction uses realism-disrupting literary techniques to make interventions into the real social conditions of our time. It seeks to capture the complex, fragmented nature of contemporary experience while addressing crucial issues like income inequality, immigration, the climate crisis, terrorism, ever-changing technologies, shifting racial, sex and gender roles, and the rise of new forms of authoritarianism. A lucid, comprehensive introduction to the genre as well as to a wide variety of voices, this book discusses more than forty writers from a diverse range of backgrounds, and over several decades, with special attention to 21st-century novels. Writers covered include: Kathy Acker, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Julia Alvarez, Sherman Alexie, Gloria Anzaldua, Margaret Atwood, Toni Cade Bambara, A.S. Byatt, Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Ana Castillo, Don DeLillo, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Awaeki Emezi, Mohsin Hamid, Jessica Hagedorn, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Daisy Johnson, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Tommy Orange, Ruth Ozeki, Ishmael Reed, Eden Robison, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Leslie Marmon Silko, Art Spiegelman, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jeannette Winterson, among others." - from the publisher

"Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is a 1991 book by Fredric Jameson, in which the author offers a critique of modernism and postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. The book began as a 1984 article in the New Left Review.[1][2] For Jameson, postmodernism is a forced but highly permeating field, given that cultures are formed through mass media ("mass culture"). This so-called mass culture indirectly forces us to shape our ideologies and brings us under the influence of media culture—a process that Jameson calls hegemony. This hegemony however has nothing to do with the postcolonial idea of colonization; rather it is a form of hegemony in the postmodern world, where media and capitalism play the most significant role in colonizing people's thoughts and ways of life. Jameson argues that postmodernism is the age of the end of traditional ideologies. The ending of traditional ideologies can be seen through new wave of the aesthetic productions. He uses architecture and painting as examples. For instance, he draws out the differences between mindsets of modernism and postmodernism by comparing Van Gogh's “Peasant Shoes” with Andy Warhol's “Diamond Dust Shoes”. For Jameson, postmodernism, as mass-culture driven by capitalism, pervades every aspect of our daily lives. Whether we want it or not, we imbibe it. This in turn makes it a "popular" culture of the masses." - from Wikipedia

"Amongst Those Left is a long-overdue study of experimental literature in Britain from the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1980s. Undertaken with the aim of refuting the idea that "while American and French fiction was exciting and groundbreaking, British novels were all dull, realist, and provincial," Booth's book takes us on a tour through the captivating work of such writers as Ann Quin, Stevie Smith, Nicholas Mosley, Stefan Themerson, B. S. Johnson, Anna Kavan, J. G. Ballard, and many, many others. In doing so, Booth effectively reimagines the twentieth-century literary landscape of Britain. Amongst Those Left is sure to add a few books to your reading list and considerably expand your library." - from the publisher

"Remembrance and self-reflection are narrative acts in which we create, rather than simply retrieve, our personal pasts and hence our conceptions of who we are. Self as Narrative considers the human capacity to evaluate, modify, and utilize the discursive codes and conventions of a plurality of communal contexts in the creation of meaningful narratives of selfhood. This book represents a genuinely original extension of an important area of theoretical debate and includes relevant applications of the ideas developed to some works of contemporary fiction, arguing for the importance of contemporary fiction as an arena of moral debate. The author emphasizes the intersubjective nature and creative possibilities of communicative praxis, and invites reconsideration of concepts such as authorship, the self, and moral responsibility in the wake of the postmodern 'dissolution of the subject'.The author offers a possible point of contact between postmodernists and communitarians, one which has significance for the current multicultural and post-colonialism debates relevant to the analysis of the three writers discussed in the second part of this book: Atwood, Banville, and Coetzee." - from the publisher

"Covering the complete range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, this volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period. It analyzes the ways in which conventional literary genres were influenced by the cultural technologies of radio, cinema and television. This work is of major importance to anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context and its relation to the contemporary." - from the publisher

"In this introduction to post-war fiction in Britain, Dominic Head shows how the novel yields a special insight into the important areas of social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth century. Head's study is the most exhaustive survey of post-war British fiction available. It includes chapters on the state and the novel, class and social change, gender and sexual identity, national identity and multiculturalism. Throughout Head places novels in their social and historical context. He highlights the emergence and prominence of particular genres and links these developments to the wider cultural context. He also provides provocative readings of important individual novelists, particularly those who remain staple reference points in the study of the subject. Accessible, wide-ranging and designed specifically for use on courses, this is the most current introduction to the subject available." - from the publisher

" A comprehensive and scholarly review of contemporary British and Irish Poetry With contributions from noted scholars in the field, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a collection of writings from a diverse group of experts. They explore the richness of individual poets, genres, forms, techniques, traditions, concerns, and institutions that comprise these two distinct but interrelated national poetries. Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Literature and Culture series, this book contains a comprehensive survey of the most important contemporary Irish and British poetry. The contributors provide new perspectives and positions on the topic. This important book: Explores the institutions, histories, and receptions of contemporary Irish and British poetry Contains contributions from leading scholars of British and Irish poetry Includes an analysis of the most prominent Irish and British poets Puts contemporary Irish and British poetry in context Written for students and academics of contemporary poetry, A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 offers a comprehensive review of contemporary poetry from a wide range of diverse contributors." - from the publisher

"The study of contemporary fiction has been growing in popularity for many years, whether via its consistent place in the news and popular culture, the rapid expansion of creative writing and contemporary literature programs at University level, or new scholarly organizations dedicated to the contemporary. Taking up issues that remain unclear concerning when 'contemporary' fiction begins, as well as how genre novels -- thrillers, science fiction, etc. -- should be considered, chapters serve as both an introduction to an area and a frame for further academic debate. A significant and central intervention into the field of Contemporary Literature, this volume focuses on fiction from the year 2000 and forward. Offering essential coverage of writers who established themselves in the last millennium, the main focus will cover those whose reputations have been forged in the last ten to fifteen years. Further, it will focus on literary fiction, that is, novels which were traditionally called literary. Over thirty essays by leading and emerging international scholars cover topics such as: - Experimentalism, Science, Nature, Narrative, and the City - Authors such as Jonathan Franzen, David Mitchell, Hari Kunzru, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters, and David Eggers - Contemporary literature in different international contexts - Interviews with contemporary authors or industry figures including Jonny Geller and Ben Markovits Accessible to experts, students, and general readers, the Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovers new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field."

"This critical introduction traces contemporary British and Irish literary cartography focusing on roots and region, dialect and dialogue, national identity and the transnational context, myth and religion." - from the publisher

"In this, the first major study of British women writers' appropriation and re-visioning of this central literary genre, Diana Wallace explores the development of a female version of the historical novel, revealing it to be one of the most important forms of women's reading and writing in the twentieth century. This study combines a comprehensive survey with detailed readings of key writers, including Georgette Heyer, Naomi Mitchison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Daphne du Maurier, Margaret Irwin, Mary Renault, 'Jean Plaidy', Dorothy Dunnett, Catherine Cookson, Mary Stewart, Philippa Gregory, A.S. Byatt and Pat Barker." - from the publisher

"A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years. We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive 'Penguin Book of British Short Stories', has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day." - Publisher description