This book guides the student through the fundamentals of this enduring literary form. By using carefully selected novels and discussing a wide range of authors including Emily Dickinson and John Kincaid, the authors provide a lively examination of the particular themes and modes of realist novels of the period. This is the only book currently available to provide such a wide range of primary and secondary material and is the prefect resource for a literature degree.

Studying genre is perhaps one of the most familiar ways of approaching literary texts, and the realist novel is one of the most distinct genres of all. The contributors to this volume look at two aspects of genre, the formal and historical, and show how writers such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens used the realist novel to tell profoundly moral tales in a popular way. The contributors also examine how some writers, such as Mary Shelley, challenged the genre's mainstream characteristics to lasting effect. Among the texts closely studied are: Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Fathers...

Literature and Gender combines an introduction to and an anthology of literary texts which powerfully demonstrate the relevance of gender issues to the study of literature. The volume covers all three major literary genres - poetry, fiction and drama - and closely examines a wide range of themes, including:

• feminity versus creativity in women's lives and writing
• the construction of female characters
• autobiography and fiction
• the gendering of language
• the interaction of race, class and gender within writing, reading and...

In this text students are introduced to three of Shakespeare's best known plays - Henry V, Othello and As You Like It - and a Restoration comedy, Aphra Behn's The Rover. The aim is to explore the concept of the literary canon and the complex process by which certain authors and works are accorded a high cultural status. Shakespeare personifies the canonical author, while Aphra Behn (the first professional woman writer, whose work was tremendously popular and controversial in the 17th century) has been largely ignored until her recent rediscovery by feminist critics. No previous knowledge of...

A selection of key critical texts (extracts from the work of Ian Watt, Arnold Kettle, Georg Lukacs, Marilyn BUtler, Edward Said and Mikhail Bakhtin) is included to develop the reader's understanding of the issues raised, and to show the origins of current debates about the novel. The emphasis throughout is upon practice, not theory, and each chapter offers exercises in reading and studying fiction.

Evolution, Order and Complexity reflects topical interest in the relationship between the social and natural worlds. It represents the cutting edge of current thinking which challenges the natural/social dichotomy thesis by showing how the application of ideas which derive from biology can be applied and offer insight into the social realm. This is done by introducing the general system theory to the methodological debate on the relation of human and natural sciences.