Drawing on much contemporary material, including Auden's fascinating unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of a great city: not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and caf� It presents portraits of figures, often fascinating in their own right, with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood's fiction, the raw material of daily existence was transformed into art. The wide scope of this study, which ranges from poetry and cinema to street violence and prostitution, provides a richly detailed context for its account of two writers engaged in the process of self-definition. (view table of contents)

Uses photographs and facsimiles of letters and poems to trace the life of a poet who achieved great fame and popularity, and attempts to show the complex personality behind the public image

Product Description: The five novels E.M.Forster published during his lifetime enjoyed a popularity and critical acclaim out of all proportion to this modest fictional output or the books' apparent pretensions: certainly since the publication of Howards End in 1910 he has been regarded almost without question as one of the foremost novelists of the century...read more

Product Description: Providing details of Wilde's life and work in an easily accessible profile, this biography makes use of surviving letters, notebooks, diaries and documents, as well as other researched biographies. Other author's in the series include Pope, Byron, Dickens, Kipling, and Tennyson.

Product Description: This book uses literary evidence to illustrate some of the main political and social developments of the 1930s and is intended for students of both literature and history. For the former, it places literary texts of the 1930s in the context of contemporary political and social events...read more

Product Description: This is a discussion of the themes and techniques of Muriel Spark's 18 novels, from "The Comforters" of 1957, through her most substantial and ambitious novel, "The Mandelbaum Gate", to "A Far Cry from Kensington" in 1988. She has been writing for 30 years, and is considered one of the most interesting and original of contemporary English novelists...read more

Describes the background of Bleak House, discusses its themes, and looks at its critical reception

Product Description: An assessment of Kipling's work arranged in a broadly chronological order. This will be useful to teachers at all academic levels, and to university and college students. Norman Page's many literary works include "The Conrad Companion", "The Dickens Companion" and "Thomas Hardy"...read more

Product Description: Book by Page, Norman

Product Description: Outline important events in writer's life.The chronology also serves as a diary as what Dickens was doing month by month, week by week.Books, magazines, journals often were worked on simultaneously as well as a prodigiously active personal life...read more

Since Speech in the English Novel first appeared in 1973, it has won international recognition as an important pioneering study of a topic that lies on the frontiers of literature and linguistics - the nature and function of fictional dialogue and its relationship to real speech. Drawing on a wide range of examples from many periods, the book includes general and theoretical chapters and also case-studies of particular texts, as well as a whole chapter devoted to Dickens. It has been found stimulating and useful by teachers and students in many countries, and has been praised by numerous scholars. The Year's Work in English Studies described it as a 'classic'; Studia Neophilologica said that it 'opened up new vistas for research'; Language and Style found that it 'admirably bridges the gap between linguistics and English studies', and English Studies judged it 'a thoroughly readable and even entertaining book'. This new edition incorporates numerous revisions, new examples, and additions to the bibliographies.

Product Description: Book by

Selections by authors such as Alice James, Hugh Walpole, and Ford Madox Ford portray the personality, conversation, and friendships of Henry James

Provides character lists, criticism, and background information about each of Dickens' novels, and includes a chronology of his life

Product Description: This volume contains extracts of the impressions Tennyson madeóas noted in letters, diaries, periodicals and memoirsóamong a diversity of men and women who recorded their encounters with the great man. The text contains extensive notes, providing information on the personalities mentioned and making connections with Tennyson's poems...read more

Product Description: Nabokov: The Critical Heritage (Critical Heritage Series)