Remembrance and self-reflection are narrative acts in which we create, rather than simply retrieve, our personal pasts and hence our conceptions of who we are. Self as Narrative considers the human capacity to evaluate, modify, and move between a plurality of communal and communicative contexts in the creation of meaningful narratives of selfhood.

The history of Plath's reception as a writer has been one of displacements. Biographical speculation, and the controversy surrounding the posthumous publication of her work, have dominated critical debate at the expense of her poetic and fictional achievement. Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning offers a new framework of interpretation for the texts, which attends to their formal complexity without detaching them either from their historical moment or from contemporary debates about language, gender and subjectivity. Interweaving close reading and theoretical reflection, Britzolakis...

Coleridge was a visionary drawn to the numinous, but he was also a spontaneous connoisseur of the sensory life. Such double-mindedness has often been criticized as a sort of incapacity; but the capability of entertaining equally necessary kinds of perception might be thought a kind of virtue. The study examines Coleridge's formative double-vision as it manifests itself in his profound self-analysis, his philosophy of mind, and his literary criticism.

This book challenges the traditional image of Joseph Conrad as writer of the sea, a man in a man's world. It re-establishes the importance of significant women in his life, and his engagement with women's writing. Rethinking received views of Conrad as a modernist writer, it also explores the experimentation of his later, less familiar works, first published in the women's pages of popular journals.

This book examines some of Donne's figurations of the feminine in his lesser known poetry and prose, allowing a deeper appreciation of his rich and complex contribution. Using the cultural criticism of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin shows how Donne's explorations of love, eroticism, friendship, and the divine in these sometimes startling works are as relevant to our time as to his own.

British Writing of the Second World War is the first study to provide a detailed critical and historical survey of British literary culture in wartime. Concerned as much with war as with writing, it explores the significance of cultural representations of violence to the administration of the war effort. A theoretical account of the symbolic practices which connect military violence to policy provides a framework for analysing imaginative and documentary literature in its relations both to propaganda and to Peoples War ideals of social reconstruction. The book evaluates wartime fictions and...

This book is the first full-length study of the theme of the siege in Medieval literature. Close reading of selected Middle English romances shows how writers used descriptions of sieges to explore such subjects as military strategy, heroism, and chivalry. Drawing on a wide range of writings in several languages, Malcolm Hebron sets the romances in a broad context, providing important insight into the medieval imagination.

This study looks anew at one of the most popular books of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Brown's Religio Medici. Daniela Havenstein considers neglected seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century responses to this central work. Browne's style is reassessed in a fresh approach that combines traditional analysis with carefully developed quantitative methods.

This is a study of a group of Jacobean Spenserian poets, William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke, and of the ways in which these writers represented themselves as a distinctive oppositional community in the years 1612 to 1625.

Palfrey presents a new vision of character, metaphor, and politics in late Shakespeare. Closely analyzing Shakespeare's use of language and genre, he shows how the plays revamp theatrical decorums. The plays are not courtly, sober, and escapist, as their reputation suggests; rather, they are peculiarly sensitive to the turbulent, unfinished quality of Shakespeare's historical moment. In both court and wilderness, Shakespeare analyzes the violence of authority, the tensions in language, and the origin and prospects of both. Palfrey argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement...