- Table View
- List View
Yeats Annual No. 11 (Yeats Annual)
by Warwick GouldYeats Annual No. 11 has four broad themes: W.B. Yeats's written and oral poetic technique; his philosophical interests in Eastern thought and A Vision; his manuscripts: and Jack B. Yeats's work, including his illustrations for his brother's writing. The contributions include: Michael Sidnell on Yeats's 'Written Speech'; Helen Vendler on Yeats and Ottava Rima; Steve Ellis on Chaucer, Yeats and the Living Voice; P.S. Sri on Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee; Matthew Gibson and Colin McDowell on A Vision and the automatic script; Wayne Chapman on the 'Countess Cathleen Row' of 1899 and revisions to the play; Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey on The Flame of the Spirit; Hilary Pyle on Jack B. Yeats's Illustrations for his Brother; John Purser's edited transcript of Jack Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy in conversation. There are shorter notes by Morton D. Paley, A.Norman Jeffares, Lis Pihl and others. Fourteen new books are reviewed and the nine plates include hitherto unpublished images.
Ben Jonson: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by W. David KayThis concise biography surveys Jonson's career and provides an introduction to his works in the context of Jacobean politics, court patronage and his many literary rivalries. Stressing his wit and inventiveness, it explores the strategies by which he attempted to maintain his independence from the conditions of theatrical production and from his patrons and introduces new evidence that, despite his vaunted classicism, he repeatedly appropriated the matter or forms of other English writers in order to demonstrate his own artistic superiority.
E. M. Forster: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Mary LagoForster's literary career is assessed in relation to works that mark its phases: his suburban novels, the Indian novel, the BBC talks, and first and last, his short fiction. This study traces evidences of his keen awareness of political and social undercurrents as discovered in the works: the importance of personal relations, culture as a precious heritage, and the creative artist as definer of cultural values and encourager of those who should preserve them.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Women Writers)
by Marjorie StoneDrawing on previously neglected manuscripts, this new study deconstructs the gender and genre ideologies obscuring the achievement of England's first major woman poet. Marjorie Stone resituates Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her cultural context, demonstrating her prominence in nineteenth-century literary history and Victorian feminist discourse. Close readings illuminate the rich intertextuality of Barrett Browning's works, her revisions of the Romantics, her innovations in a range of genres and her creation of emancipatory strategies for the woman writer.
Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections (Interviews and Recollections)
by J. StapeThis volume provides multi-faceted perspectives on Virginia Woolf as observed and remembered by relatives, close friends, acquaintances and fellow writers. Gathered from scattered sources, the forty-one pieces - some published for the first time - provide an intimate portrait of a fascinating individual who many consider this century's most significant woman writer. This new and varied collection sheds light on the private and public personalities of Virginia Woolf the subtle poetic novelist, the devoted friend and the influential and successful publisher.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent and The Shadow Line
by Norman PageCombining the most widely-read and studied of Conrad's novels, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, with The Shadow Line, this volume represents Conrad's early, middle and later writing. With an extensive introduction, explanatory notes, a chronology of Conrad's life and a glossary of nautical terms, this is an invaluable edition for students.
The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequence
by Joan Ozark HolmerThe Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare's most frequently performed and currently most controversial comedy, continues to confront in its stage and critical history the ongoing debate over its artistic unity. Six chapters explore the degree of dramatic integrity Shakespeare achieves by unifying the play's many hard choices through a tightly-knit interplay of contrarieties and correspondences in structure, language, characters and ideas. Engaging the play's extensive body of criticism, this book contextualizes the most provocative questions raised by the play and provides considerable new evidence about Shakespeare's possible sources and his innovative use of them, especially usury and merchantry, Jew and Christian, biblical and classical allusion, stage law and verbal-visual symbols.
Webster and Ford (English Dramatists)
by Rowland WymerThe reputation of Webster and Ford is based on a handful of tragedies remarkable for their extreme situations and emotional intensity. Successful productions since 1945 have helped to vindicate the enthusiastic judgement of nineteenth-century Romantic critics and demonstrated that these plays retain their capacity to disturb audiences, arousing strong responses of both horror and pity. Rowland Wymer outlines the careers of both dramatists and illuminates the Jacobean and Caroline theatrical contexts. He goes on to give original and detailed analyses of six plays, emphasising their emotional power and theatrical effectiveness and making frequent reference to modern performances. The plays considered include The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore.
Henry James: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Kenneth GrahamThis comprehensive account of the writing life of Henry James aims at providing a critical overview of all his important writings, firmly set in two contexts: that of James's practical career as a novelist in America, England, and Europe; and that of the literary and intellectual climate of his time. By tracing the complex development of his career under such headings as 'American and Romantic', 'Victorian and Realist', 'Crisis and Experiment' and 'Master and Modernist', it gives a dynamic portrait, both factual and interpretative, of one of the greatest and most prolific novelists in the language, whose many-sided career began in the time of Thackeray and Dickens, and ended by ushering in the writings of Joyce and Woolf.
What Katy Read: Feminist Re-Readings of ‘Classic’ Stories for Girls
by Shirley Foster Judy SimonsWhat Katy Read focuses on a much neglected area of literary criticism: literature for girls. Written by women for children, such texts have been doubly marginalized by the critical establishment. Shirley Foster and Judy Simons use twentieth-century feminist critical practice to open up fresh perspectives on popular fiction for girls written between 1850 and 1920. The study analyses both American and British novels for girls which have acquired 'classic' status, from the domestic myth to the school story, and considers their scope and influence in providing role models for girl readers.
Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers
by John SutherlandThe proportion of Victorian novels in print today represents only a tiny fraction of what was published by this vast writing industry. Exact figures will never be known but we can estimate that around 50,000 works were produced by around 3,500 novelists during the Victorian era. But who wrote these novels and what inspired them to write? How were their novels published and how did they adapt their techniques to ensure the public's appetite for fiction was fed? Drawing on extensive research, John Sutherland builds up a fascinating picture of the cultural, social and commercial factors influencing the content and production of Victorian fiction. Collins, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Trollope are discussed in tandem with writers also very popular with the reading public - Reade, Lytton and Mrs Humphry Ward - but whose fame has not endured. As John Sutherland demonstrates, author-publisher relations played a central role in determining the success of new novels, with some impressive achievements on both sides. Richly informative on the Victorian literary and cultural scene, this important study by one of our leading scholars is set to become essential reading for all those interested in the evolution of the Victorian novel.
Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (Language, Discourse, Society)
by Raymond TallisThis work subjects the fundamental ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Barthes and their followers to an examination and demonstrates the baselessness of post-Saussurean claims about the relations between language, reality and self.
Eliot to Derrida: The Poverty of Interpretation
by John Harwood Rosario Forlenza'...a book which should be read by all students contemplating enrolment for a university course in modern English or European literary studies.' - Roy Harris, Times Higher Education Supplement Eliot to Derrida is a sardonic portrait of the cult of the specialist interpreter, from I.A. Richards and the Cambridge School to Jacques Derrida and his disciples. This lucid, iconoclastic study shows how, and why, so much of the academic response to a rich variety of literary experiment has been straitjacketed by the vast industries which have grown up around `modernism' and `postmodernism'. For anyone disenchanted with the extravagant claims - and leaden prose - of literary theorists, this will be an exhilarating book.
The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams
by E. AndrewsThis is a critical study of Friel's entire oeuvre, relating Friel's work to the problems of subjectivity, representation, history and the body, with a view to offering some placement of Friel in relation to both postmodernism and traditional humanism. Central to this study is Friel's concept of 'translation', whereby he offers us the tension of shaping the new through a 'translation' or reformulation of the old.
British Poetry, 1900-50: Aspects of Tradition
by Gary Day Brian DochertyThis collection focuses on British poetry from the Georgians to the Second World War. The introduction provides the framework for the articles which follow by considering the question of the relation between poetry and society as it appears in the work of F.R. Leavis, T.W. Adorno and Antony Easthope. Written by experts, the essays cover poetic movements and individual authors, both mainstream and neglected, and address the difficult problem of making value judgements while situating poetry in its historical context.
Edith Wharton: Traveller in the Land of Letters
by Janet Beer Goodwyn'...in this study, Goodwyn sets the standard for Wharton criticism.' - Judith E. Funston, American Literature 'Janet Goodwyn sets out, by looking at Wharton's appropriation of different cultures, to nail the 'canard' that she was 'but a pale imitator of Henry James' - Hermione Lee, Times Literary Supplement `The Land of Letters was henceforth to be my country and I gloried in my new citizenship'. So Edith Wharton described her elation upon the publication of her first collection of short stories; her nationality was henceforth `writer' and as such she moved with ease between landscapes, between cultures and between genres in the telling of her tales. In this acclaimed study of Wharton's work, the discussion is shaped by her use of specific landscapes and her consistent concern with ideas of place: the American's place in the Western world, the woman's place in her own and in European society, and the author's place in the larger life of a culture. Her landscapes, both actual and metaphorical, give structure and point to the individual texts and to the whole body of her work.
Modernisms: A Literary Guide
by Peter NichollsThe recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of modernism as monolithic and reactionary. In a lively and wide-ranging discussion, Peter Nicholls argues that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Providing original analytic accounts of each of the main movements, he explores the ways in which the new stylistic developments were closely bound up with a shifting politics of gender and authority. Modernisms introduces the reader to a wealth of literary experiment, beginning in the nineteenth century world of Baudelaire and Mallarme and moving forward into the recognisably modern one of the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealist - histories which allow the familiar terrain of Anglo-American Modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light. Modernisms invites us to rethink our habits of reading seminal works of twentieth-century British and American literature, transforming one thing into many, and evoking the richness and diversity of a cultural moment which continues to shape our own.
American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal (Insights)
by Clive Bloom Brian DochertyTracing its origins back to Walt Whitman, the Modernist tradition in American poetry is driven by the same concern to engage with the world in revolutionary terms, inspired by the concept of democracy vital to the American dream. But this tradition is not confined to a few writers at the beginning of the century: instead it has been an enduring force, extending from coast to coast and of varying hues: Imagist, Objectivist, Beat. International in flavour but shaped by the language and conditions of America, this poetry continues to speak to us today. This collection of specially commissioned essays brings together leading scholars and critics to define the American Modernist canon, providing a range of perspectives helpful to all those interested in this fascinating poetry.
Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin
by Andrew SwarbrickThis detailed study of Larkin's poetry, the first to take account of recent biographical and archival material, offers new insights into Larkin's development as a poet and a fresh assessment of his achievement. Focusing on Larkin's separately published volumes within the framework of the Collected Poems, this analysis of Larkin's practice and controversial status presents a poet more fundamentally challenging than often supposed. This book will appeal to the specialist, student and general reader alike.
American Drama (Insights)
by Clive Bloom Brian DochertyAn introduction to American drama, aimed at students, academics and serious readers, which is also concerned that the unfamiliar names and forgotten voices of those who made a major contribution to its history, have been unfairly neglected.
Iris Murdoch
by Hilda D. SpearThis book attempts to offer a critical survey of the fiction of one of our most prolific living novelists. After giving a short account of Murdoch's life and work, it goes on to look at the novels themselves, dividing them into chronological periods and suggesting parallels between them and the progress of Murdoch's philosophic thought.
Norman Mailer (Palgrave Modern Novelists Series)
by Michael K. GlendaySince the publication of his first novel The Naked and the Dead in 1949, Norman Mailer has remained one of America's most innovative and controversial writers. This comprehensive study includes new evaluations of Mailer's fiction of the 1960s, together with his most recent work. The book offers a lucid and thorough appraisal of the work of a writer of whom it was once said, 'so goes Mailer, so goes America'.
John Milton: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
by Cedric C. BrownFor the first time in an approachable, affordable volume this study treats the whole literary career of England's most distinguished protestant-republican poet and writer, considering the miscellaneous output in the light of contexts and political functions. It highlights self-presentational and persuasive characteristics, pays attention to the sense of vocation and also describes Milton's distinctive achievement in social genres. Milton's competitive humanist training is seen to accomodate uneasily to the specific demands of some public works. The book features unfamiliar texts, whilst canonical texts are set in the story of his long endeavours during a turbulent period in English history.
Toni Morrison (Modern Novelists)
by Linden PeachThe novels of Toni Morrison, the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, are powerful not just because of their content - her themes include infanticide, rape, child abuse, murder and sexual jealousy - but because of their innovative form and language. This succinct critical introduction to her work seeks to make her novels more accessible to student and general reader alike through unravelling notions of self, representation and narrative structure which will be new to readers accustomed to Euro-American literary conventions.
The Language of George Orwell (The Language of Literature)
by Roger FowlerGeorge Orwell is well known for his strong views on language, society and politics, and admired for the robust, personal tone of his writings. The Language of George Orwell, the first detailed study of his style, demonstrates his stylistic versatility, and analyzes the linguistic techniques which create a variety of memorable effects in his novels and other prose works. Roger Fowler is a leading exponent of linguistic criticism, the method of analysis employed in this book.