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.

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves - to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid'. This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

Much of Mary Shelley's life reads like a compilation of some of the most lurid and sensationalist novels of her time. After the stormy years of her relationship with Percy Shelley, Mary went on to raise her one surviving son on her own, never sure of the loyalty of friends, threatened and intimidated by her dead husband's father. John Williams offers a thoughtful assessment of her literary achievement, set against the background of the evolution of the English novel in the politically volatile years of the early nineteenth century.

In 'Percy Bysshe Shelly: A Literary Life', Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life . The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the...

Much of Mary Shelley's life reads like a compilation of some of the most lurid and sensationalist novels of her time. After the stormy years of her relationship with Percy Shelley, Mary went on to raise her one surviving son on her own, never sure of the loyalty of friends, threatened and intimidated by her dead husband's father. John Williams offers a thoughtful assessment of her literary achievement, set against the background of the evolution of the English novel in the politically volatile years of the early nineteenth century.

William Shakespeare is the best-known writer in the English-speaking world. Contrary to popular myth, we actually know more about him and his career than we do about most dramatists of his era - the fruits of three hundred years of fascinated research. Whilst we know less than we would like about Shakespeare's private life, we do have a far clearer picture of his professional career, and of the theatres and social structures with which he was involved. And yet the significance of what we know is fiercely contested and we are challenged by a host of contradictions. Elizabethan actors were...

Throughout his long working life, Tennyson was experimenting with new forms and subjects. Widely read in a range of disciplines, he responsed to many of the personalities, events and discoveries of the Victorian age. Still widely regarded as an apologist for the 'establishment', Tennyson was always an outsider. Scourged by reviewers, and haunted by his own nervous disposition, Tennyson endured years of despair. Even when the tide turned in 1850 Tennyson remained a stern critic of his contemporaries.

This biography emphasises the extraordinary versatility and resourcefulness of a lifetime spent serving the public interest with the pen. At the same time, it shows Swift's distinctive love of writing for personal entertainment and diversion, with little or no interest in publication. While remaining a fiercely committed writer, he always tried to preserve, especially in his poetry and letters, a literature dedicated to friendship. Swift's literary career comprises much more than the well-known satires.