Elizabethan Fictions is a study of the works of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, and a number of other English writers in the context of changing attitudes to fiction in Elizabethan England. Both the censors and the writers of the time were aware that the developments in Elizabethan prose threatened to transform the nature of fiction itself, and it was felt that these destructive capabilities might constitute a material threat to the security of the Elizabethan state. Maslen explores their violations of current conventions, their mockery of contemporary...

A radical re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays, Revising Wilde challenges long-established views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy. Instead Wilde emerges as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society. Sos Eltis traces Wilde's painstaking revisions and redrafting of his plays, and uncovers Wilde's subtle methods of lampooning his conventional sources. In the process Eltis discovers, concealed in successive versions, Wilde the anarchist, the socialist, and the feminist. Taking into account the most...

The poets writing in the first years of the twentieth century have commonly been discussed in isolation. In Edwardian Poetry, Kenneth Millard considers together seven poets--Henry Newbolt, John Masefield, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, A.E. Housman, John Davidson, and Rupert Brooke--and argues that their work is worthy of more serious critical attention than it has previously received. Through an analysis of numerous individual poems, Millard isolates certain common concerns: the changing and perhaps fading value of the idea of England, a distrust of the medium of language itself, and a...

Primitive and metropolitan life nourished T. S. Eliot's imagination and emerged as recurrent themes in his work. Examining these twin concerns, Robert Crawford sheds new light on the poet's achievement--particularly those works that culminated in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes--and clarifies Eliot's relentless obsession with "savages" and sophisticates.

This book examines literary romance as a vehicle for the ideological contradictions of British imperialism in South Africa from 1880 to 1920. Drawing on postcolonial theory and cultural materialism, Laura Chrisman discusses the fictions of mining (King Solomon's Mines) and Zulu history (Nada the Lily) by the imperialist Rider Haggard, and shows how feminist Olive Schreiner and black nationalist Sol Plaatje produced counter-fictions of metropolitan and African resistance. The novels are examined as responses to political, economic, and social developments of imperial capitalism: mining; the...

A Critical Difference is a valuable study of perhaps the most intriguing and important critical debate of the 1920s. The book offers a detailed introduction to the unjustly neglected criticism of Murry and sheds new light on T. S. Eliot's role as a polemicist and controversialist in the conflicts of literary-critical culture in the 1920s.

Offering an entirely new interpretation of the economic context of 16th-century literature, this book challenges the tendency to explain Nashe's texts in journalistic and commercial terms. Hutson reveals a previously overlooked link between humanist approaches to the literary text and the social and ethical transformation of the English economy. She blames lack of literary activity in general on the political emphasis and value placed on the printed word, and demonstrates that Nashe's work was the result of an intricate, socially engaged imagination rather than an eccentric sensibility.

Since its creation in 1980 by actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) and playwright Brian Friel (Translation, Dancing at Lughnasa), Northern Ireland's Field Day Theatre Company has brought challenging drama to the entire island, "from Coleraine to Kerry." With the addition to the board of directors of poets and critics such as Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and Seamus Deane, Field Day ventured into the realm of the more explicitly political with a controversial pamphlet series. Acting Between the Lines is a fascinating study of one of the most important developments in contemporary Irish...

A comprehensive reassessment of Middleton's cultural importance, this wide-ranging study examines both the writer's dramatic and non-dramatic texts to demonstrate how he laid bare the complicit interests at work behind the assumptions about sex, morality, society and politics in late feudal culture.

Conrad's early fiction originated as a response to his travels in Malaysia, Borneo, and the Congo. As a sensitive observer of other cultures and a notable emigre, he was profoundly aware of the psychological impact of travel, and much of his early fiction portrays both literal and figurative voyages of Europeans into other cultures. This is the first detailed analysis of Conrad's early works in relation to other writings on "primitive" peoples, notably nineteenth-century anthropology, Victorian travel writing, and contemporary anthropological theory.
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