Product Description: The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious...read more

Here is the first full-length biography of Bernard Malamud, the self-made son of poor Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of the post-war period, a man who at the peak of his success stood alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the ranks of Jewish American writers.To tell Malamud's story, Philip Davis has drawn on exclusive interviews with family, friends, and colleagues; unfettered access to private journals and letters; and detailed analysis of Malamud's working methods through previously unresearched manuscripts. Nothing came easily to Malamud: his family was poor, his mother probably committed suicide when Malamud was 14, and his younger brother inherited her schizophrenia. Davis's meticulous biography explores the many connections between Malamud's life and work, revealing all that it meant for this man to be a writer, both in terms of how he brought his life into his writing and how his writing affected his life. It also restores Bernard Malamud's literary reputation as one of the great original voices of his generation, a writer of superb subtlety and clarity.

Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionate defense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact and importance for readers interested in the relationship between literature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature for contemporary readers and academics, through the author’s unique insight into why it is still important today Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian works of literature and close readings of important texts Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, from general readers and scholars alike Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set of values, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital and resonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis

Product Description: Shakespearean thinking is always dynamic: thinking that happens in the living moment of its performance, in quickly passing process. This book offers a model of human mentality that can be shown through the dense immediacy of dramatic thinking, as embodied above all in Shakespeare's working method...read more

Product Description: The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more.Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Uses maps to trace the region's history, the development of societies, and changes in internal and external politics (view table of contents)

Poets, novelists and critics committed to genuinely creative thinking join together in this collection of essays to explore what serious reading really means to them. Although to varying degrees opposed to current trends in literary theory, the contributors are more concerned to show what, as distinct individual voices, they stand for rather than merely against. They each provide a personal vision of what reading and writing can offer to the reality of a human life, in terms of independent thinking and dynamic feeling.

Product Description: For Ruskin (1819-1900), the scrutiny of art ensures moral, social and religious comprehension of humanity's relationship to the world. This selection draws on Modern Painters (1843 - 1860) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853) to present Ruskin's conception of art and the edification it works on human understanding...read more

Product Description: Memory and Writing from Wordsworth to Lawrence: From Wordsworth to Lawrence (Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Totowa, N.J.), 21.)

Product Description: In this wide-ranging work, the author challenges T. S. Eliot’s belief that "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates". Davis examines the relation of imagination and the creation of art to the experience of life, both individual and social, which provides the source and subject of so much nineteenth-century literature...read more