In this major reassessment, now available in paperback, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a brilliantly detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited. Attending closely to each of the novels, Gray shows how they brim with an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural.

John Sutherland's new critical biography is an undertaking of major importance in which he penetrates into the darker areas of Scott's life in a sceptical (yet sympathetic) spirit,

Rosemary Ashton explores the many facets of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's complex personality, by turns poet, critic, thinker, enchanting companion, feckless husband, fabled conversationalist and guilt-ridden opium addict.

W. B. Yeats is widely regarded as the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. This new critical biography seeks to tell the story of his life as it unfolded in the various contexts in which Yeats worked as an artist and as public figure.

He has written a masterful biography, rich in enlivened critical detail, which more than any other study of Waugh to date, works to redress the bias against its subject that is so representative of Stannard's major two-volume account.

Goethe established a major European reputation and profoundly influenced his contemporaries and literary successors, not least among them the British Romantic writers Coleridge, Scott, and Byron.

• Offers a comprehensive one-volume study of a major European literary figure.
  
• Deals in depth and detail with the totality of Goethe's output and activity.

Providing a close examination of Milton's wide-ranging prose and poetry at each stage of his life, Barbara Lewalski reveals a rather different Milton from that in earlier accounts.

• Provides a close analysis of each of Milton's prose and poetry works.
  
• Reveals how Milton was the first writer to self consciously construct himself as an 'author'.
  
• Focuses on the development of Milton's ideas and his art.

In this major revision of The Life of Samuel Johnson, Robert DeMaria makes a compelling claim for the attention of a new generation of Johnson's readers and admirers.

This important new critical biography traces in carefully considered detail what is known of Geoffrey Chaucer's personal life while exploring the fascinating relationship between the man of affairs, who made so many 'improvisations and accommodations' to ensure his own survival, and the poet. A major reexamination of England's greatest narrative poet, it is supplemented with reproductions of Chaucer portraits and other illustrations, including maps of medieval England.

Turner's strikingly original and penetrating account of Hardy's extraordinarily creative life and longevity offers a series of thirty-two chapters, each of which relates the biographical and literary background of a single work.