Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life situates the individual works of Marlowe within the context of his overall literary career. Areas covered include Marlowe's preference for foreign settings and his unusually accurate depictions of them, the importance of his scholarly background, his consistent portrayal of family groups as fissured and troubled, the challenge that his works posed to contemporary orthodoxies about religion, sexuality, and government, and the long and sometimes spectacular afterlife of his works and of his literary reputation as a whole.

John Donne's individuality has been heavily stressed in the twentieth century. This book recognises the individuality of Donne's writing, but aims to relate this to the particular circumstances of his life and to the pressures of the period in which Donne lived. Both his poetry and his prose are seen less in purely aesthetic terms, therefore, than as products of a difficult life lived at a difficult time.

Part of a series which follows the outline of writers' working lives, aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. This is a sympathetic portrait of the poet who overcame the obscurity of his origins to become the uncrowned Laureate of his age.

Part of a series which offers accounts of the literary careers of the most widely read British and Irish authors. This volume looks at T.S.Eliot and traces the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped his writing.

Henry Fielding: A Literary Life characterizes Fielding's complex personality, in some ways full of contradiction, and yet resolved both by a deep knowledge of human nature, including his own, and by his innate social constructiveness and his gift for friendship and love. The book also details ways in which Fielding's complex attitudes contribute to the subject-matter of his plays and novels and to the rhetorical strategies that control their shape as well. It further shows that his work as lawyer, London magistrate, and social and political essayist was similarly informed.

Forster'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.