Product Description: From the 10th-century manuscript of Beowulf to the work of such 20th-century authors as T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, and Angela Carter, this beautifully illustrated book presents a panorama of more than 1000 years of literature in English through original manuscripts from the British Library's unparalleled collections...read more

Product Description: This is an exciting collection of essays on the rule of Charles I at a time of fundamental importance to English history. This book combines the work of historians with academics from literary studies to provide an interdisciplinary study of the culture and political life of the decade...read more

Product Description: Essential for students of theatre studies, this series of 6 decadal volumes provides a critical survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume features a critical analysis of the work of four key playwrights from that decade together with an extensive commentary on the period...read more

Product Description: How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1970s shape Contemporary British Fiction?Exploring the impact of events like the Cold War, miners' strikes and Winter of Discontent, this volume charts the transition of British fiction from post-war to contemporary...read more

Product Description: How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1980s shape contemporary British fiction? Setting the fiction squarely within the context of Conservative politics and questions about culture and national identity, this volume reveals how the decade associated with Thatcherism frames the work of Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, and Graham Swift, of Scottish novelists and new diasporic writers...read more

Product Description: How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 1990s shape contemporary British Fiction? From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the millennium, the 1990s witnessed a realignment of global politics. Against the changing international scene, this volume uses events abroad and in Britain to examine and explain the changes taking place in British fiction, including: the celebration of national identities, fuelled by the move toward political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales; the literary optimism in urban ethnic fictions written by a new generation of authors, born and raised in Britain; the popularity of neo-Victorian fiction...read more

Product Description: How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading...read more

Product Description: Contemporary creative writers reflect on the past, present and future of the novelIn 2012-2013, a year-long conversation between writers took place at 17 literary festivals around the world, from Jaipur to Krasnoyarsk, and from Melbourne to Berlin...read more

Product Description: George Eliot created fiction that was both romantic and realistic. Her vision was that of an independent woman and a social reformer. Her characters rivaled Dickens for their complexity, and her plots echoed Shaw and Ibsen for their social concerns.

Product Description: Originally published in 1911, this book contains an assessment of the remaining fragments of Dickens' unfinished novel Edwin Drood. Dickens scholar Henry Jackson does not attempt to reconstruct the story's plot, but brings out certain details overlooked by other experts of his day, including clues contained in the book's unpublished cover...read more

Product Description: As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from being a potboiler, this translation left an indelible imprint on Johnson...read more

Product Description: Focusing on Algernon Charles Swinburne's later writings, this collection makes a case for the seriousness and significance of the writer's mature work. While Swinburne's scandalous early poetry has received considerable critical attention, the thoughtful, rich, spiritually and politically informed poetry that began to emerge in his thirties has been generally neglected...read more

Product Description: Since the work of Milman Parry, Homeric poetry has been subjected to a meticulous re-evaluation. The question of how closely an oral tale should be searched for subtle meanings applies, not just to Homer, but to all traditional literature...read more

Product Description: Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds. But the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, the modern human / animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’s famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am...read more