'Madame Bovary' ranks among the world's most famous and widely read novels, and has inspired numerous critical theories. First published in 1987, this study draws on both 20th-century and traditional critical views to provide both students and scholars with a fresh analysis of the novel: its narrative techniques, social background, and underlying structures. By setting the novel in an historical context, and exploring the ways in which it offers a hinge between romanticism and realism, the book establishes a framework through which the reader can assess questions of narrative strategy, of...

First published in 1986, this title critiques the canonical view of Milton as an isolated great man, and reassesses the impact of the Puritan Revolution on two of his major works: the 'Areopagitica' and 'Paradise Lost'. The study focuses on the emergence of a discreet ethical framework of thought within the dominant theological code of these two works, arguing that this framework - integral to Protestantism - is also crucial to the construction of subjectivity under capitalism.

'Narrative Exchanges' shows how a general model of communicative exchanges can be refined to deal with the complexities of narrative fiction. Going beyond the two-way structure of reciprocity, it gives particular attention to the processes of framing, substitution and dispossession by which written texts generate meaning.

Lord Hankey (1877-1963) was a British civil servant and the first Cabinet Secretary, a top aide to Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Cabinet that directed Britain in World War One. Mostly derived from the author's diaries, which begin in March 1915, this study describes how Lord Hankey contributed to the development of the British system of Cabinet Government during the war years.

The classic realist text has long been derided by post-structuralist critics as an unsophisticated and reactionary form. In this study, first published in 1992, John Rignall makes a powerful case for the rehabilitation of realism as a self-aware and reflexive genre.

Lord Hankey (1877-1963) was a British civil servant and the first Cabinet Secretary, a top aide to Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Cabinet that directed Britain in World War One. Mostly derived from the author's diaries, which begin in March 1915, this study describes how Lord Hankey contributed to the development of the British system of Cabinet Government during the war years.

Peter Hughes explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, and the interplay of fictional and non-fictional patters in what is his obsessive vision of human life. Hughes shows how Naipaul's narratives pair off histories and novels, travel-writing and psycho-biography, reinforcing one another and Naipaul's vision of 'a world undoing itself' - a world of disorder and fantasy.

First published in 1984, this title examines the development of a special rhetoric in Dickens' work, which, by using grotesque effects, challenged the complacency of his middle-class Victorian readers. The study begins by exploring definitions of the grotesque and moves on to look at three key aspects that particularly impacted on Dickens' imagination: popular theatre (especially pantomime), caricature, and the tradition of the Gothic novel.

Modern plays are strikingly diverse and, as a result, any attempt to locate an underlying unity between them encounters difficulties: to focus on what they have in common is often to overlook what is of primary importance in particular plays; to focus on their differences is to note the novelty of the plays without increasing their accessibility. In this study, first published in 1985, Austin E. Quigley takes as his paradigm case the relationship between the world of the stage and the world of the audience, and explores various modes of communication between domains.

With the growth of popular literary forms, particularly the periodical, during the eighteenth century, women began to assume an unprecedented place in print culture as readers and writers. Yet at the same time the very textual practices of that culture inscribed women within an increasingly restrictive and oppressive set of representations.