Best known for his sexually provocative Poems and Ballads (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was much admired throughout the 19th-century for his daring subject matter and superb poetic craftsmanship. After a decline in popularity in the twentieth century, his reputation has steadily recovered, and he is now becoming more widely read and studied. This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections - Poems and Ballads 1(1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Poems and Ballads 2(1878), as well as a number of his...

Available for the first time in the United States a new series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the mast recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Published in the U. K. by Northcote House in association with The British Council.

Available for the first time in the United States a new series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the mast recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Published in the U. K. by Northcote House in association with The British Council.

A new study introducing Hopkins's poetry and prose through its wide-ranging engagements with nature, language, science, philosophy, theology, prosody and social issues.

Professor Beer's study provides an introduction to the whole range of Edith Wharton's work in the novel, short story, novella, travel writing, criticism and autobiography. The opening chapter provides an overview of recent scholarship in Wharton studies including an appraisal of biographical texts, and subsequent chapters treat recurrent themes and ideas in her fiction and non-fiction, and the American and European context of her work. The major novels, as well as those less well-known, are discussed as are: contemporary reception of her work, American responses to her expatriation, her...

Available for the first time in the United States a new series of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the mast recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Published in the U. K. by Northcote House in association with The British Council.

This new edition of Elizabeth Maslen's successful study covers the full range of Doris Lessing's work and explores in detail both its form and content.

Alan Ayckbourn is, after Shakespeare is Britain's most performed playwright and acknowledged as one of its most skilful directors. In 50 years he has written more than seventy plays and directed three times that number emerging as a formidable dramatist of international renown. Dismissed at first as a "mere boulevadier," he is now seen as an outstanding modern comic playwright, exploring themes of social and political importance with a bleak eye and a capacity to construct comedy out of the experience of the middle class audience. This book explores the range of his work which covers light...

Contemporary scholarship about W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) is increasingly clear about the implications of his being a nationalist from a Protestant background. He always felt a degree of distance from his Catholic compatriots, while at the same time believing that his own background offered him relative freedom to interpret Ireland's pre-Christian traditions and mythology. This study shows how Yeats moved from passionate identification with the idea of Ireland in his early work, through a period in which he reemphasizes his Anglo-Irish inheritance and its difference from that of Catholics, to a...

When Pat Barker was published in 2002, it was the first study to investigate this award-winning and popular writer’s fiction in a sustained way. This updated second edition coincides with the centenary of the First World War, a major preoccupation from Liza's England through the Regeneration Trilogyto Toby's Room. Many of Barker’s stories balance on the serrated edges of the military experience as she depicts it, to include bombs, bullets and bayonets but also psychological pressures of conscience and class under which soldiers struggle, and debates over how to represent war in which...