The Elizabethan Court poet Edward de Vere has, since 1920, lived a notorious second, wholly illegitimate life as the putative author of the poems and plays of William Shakespeare. The work reconstructs Oxford's life, assesses his poetic works, and demonstrates the absurdity of attributing Shakespeare's works to him. The first documentary biography of Oxford in over seventy years, Monstrous Adversary seeks to measure the real Oxford against the myth. Impeccably researched and presenting many documents written by Oxford himself, Nelson's book provides a unique insight into Elizabethan society...

Prominent citizens in 19th-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong undercurrents of chaos and uncertainty.

Traditional accounts of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetry, have depicted John Clare as a peripheral figure, an 'original genius' whose talents set him apart from the mainstream of contemporary literary culture. But in recent years there has been a major shift of direction in Clare studies. Jonathan Bate, Zachary Leader and others have helped to show that Clare, far from being an isolated genius, was deeply involved in the rich cultural life both of his village and the metropolis. This study takes impetus from this new critical direction, offering an account of his poems as they relate to...

A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform (www. oapen. org).
2009 was the bicentenary of the birth of the English writer, translator, critic and amateur artist Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (1809-1893). Bringing together a comprehensive collection of her surviving correspondence, the Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake reveals significant new material about this extraordinary figure in Victorian society. The scope of Lady Eastlake's writing is wide and interdisciplinary, which recommends her as a significant figure in Victorian...

This book argues that Tony Harrison's poetry is barbaric. It revisits one of the most misquoted passages of twentieth-century philosophy: Theodor Adorno's apparent dismissal of post-Holocaust poetry as 'impossible' or 'barbaric'. His statement is reinterpreted as opening up the possibility that the awkward and embarrassing poetics of writers such as Harrison might be re-evaluated as committed responses to the worst horrors of twentieth-century history. Most of the existing critical work on Harrison focuses on his representation of class, which occludes his interest in other aspects of...

Graham's work was published by T. S. Eliot in the 1940s and 50s, but as a major post-war poet, his work has received astonishingly little critical attention given its prestige and influence. This collection of essays covers all aspects of Graham's work - its critical reception, recent influence and its relations with other developments in the arts, in particular the work of the St Ives School of visual artists. It includes some biographical material (brief reminiscences by and interviews with those who knew him) and discussions of the material contained in several collections of manuscripts....