This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

This study of Dickens's career as a professional writer uses a range of material to describe and analyze the ways in which his work can be seen as a form of literary production. It thus offers a challenge to traditional accounts which stress the private nature of Dickens's genius. Smith focuses on the communal nature of Dickens's achievement in his struggles with publishers, the expectations of a vast public, and the demands of serialization.

This study argues that protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the expectations of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society, in the radical circles of the Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson.

By the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had come to be regarded as one of the most successful and original British authors of the twentieth-century, and her writing has subsequently become the focus of a burgeoning body of criticism. This book disentangles the cult of Angela Carter as 'the fairy godmother of magical realism' from her own claims to be a materialist and a 'demythologiser' by placing her within the social, political and theoretical context within which she wrote. Drawing on Carter's own autobiographical articles as well as her novels and short stories, this study...

How was Ted Hughes's poetry affected by Sylvia Plath? What is the importance of his early life on the Yorkshire moors with his elder brother, that he called Paradise? How did writing Birthday Letters affect his attitude to his life and career? This book attempts to answer these questions by a close study of Hughes's poetic development.

This 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.

This is not a straightforward biography but rather an attempt to describe and examine Yeats as a phenomenon, partly shaped by forces and movements around him and partly shaping the public events of his time. His position in literary, political and cultural matters is detailed and the book offers, through the study of Yeats, an introduction to the fashions of ideas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

For 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...