English Literature

The book reconsiders Soyinka’s contribution to the debate about African identity, exploring the various elements constituting his distinctive aesthetic and apprehension of African culture. It concentrates on his plays, his fiction and poetry and i...

In Julius Caesar Shakespeare links the problem of treachery between Roman men with the institution of marriage, and with men’s dissociation from women. He asked his first audience to recognise in the Rome that he represents features of the England...

One of the best loved of Shakespeare’s ‘middle comedies’, As You Like It has rarely been out of the theatrical repertoire. Centring on the cross-dressed figure of Rosalind, the play both celebrates and questions the state of being in love. Recent ...

This critical study of a key figure in Victorian literary society examines Walter Pater's work on art history, literature and Greek studies, as well as analysing the roles of gender and journalism in shaping his writing.

This is a lucid introduction to a great poet of the 20th century from an internationally recognised Aude n expert. Smith''s text offers the reader fresh insights into Auden''s significance both in his own time and today '

In line with a major tendency in post-colonial criticism, this study assumes the value of cultural and historical studies but also makes use of notions of difference derived from the work of Derrida. Irish writing, including the poetry of Yeats, i...

The writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge are crucial to the literature of European Romanticism. As well as the early poems such as The Ancient Mariner and Frost at Midnight, for which he is probably best known, they comprise lectures, periodical es...

Tolstoy’s art as represented in his greatest novels: War and Peace and Anna Karenina continues to absorb, fascinate and delight modern readers despite the lack of appeal of much of his later convictions. His great works continue to exercise a prof...

Locating Conrad’s work in the context of the writer’s life and cultural milieu, Professor Watts’s study examines the main phase in Conrad’s literary development. Drawing out the distinctive thematic preoccupations and technical devices in Conrad’s...

Dr Davies’ stimulating study covers the full range of Donne’s poetry, from the early satires and elegies to the Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems, and includes thoughtful analysis of parts of his memorable sermons. Questioning the traditional cri...

Barbara Hardy has concentrated on the late period from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, The Jolly Corner and other tal...

Edmund Spenser (1554-1599) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calendar (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-96) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixt...

This book provides a clear account of the development and the scope of the sonnet form in Britain.

Nicholas Royle presents a new Forster – one that has emerged from the posthumous publication of his explicitly homosexual fiction (since 1971) and from new critical attention to issues of language and textuality, Englishness and national identity,...

This study covers a wide range of Doris Lessing's works, including all of the novels (from The Grass is Singing through The Golden Notebook to The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child) and a representative selection of her non-fictional prose and sh...

Christopher Marlowe is a writer of energy and extravagance. Plays such as Doctor Faustus, Edward the Second, The Jew of Malta, and Tamburlaine continue to challenge and startle modern readers as much as they did the Elizabethan world. Marlowe’s wr...

After Shakespeare the most famous British author in Europe, in Britain Byron was for years either neglected, or a victim of the myth of his own personality. Now he is read and studied both for his complex politics and as a forerunner of many of th...

This new study of Andrew Marvell offers a state-of-the-art guide to one of the most intriguing and elusive poets of the seventeenth century. Hero to the eighteenth century for his published defences of parliamentary government and religious tolera...