This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...

The book consists of a series of discussions of the prose fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson, from his first book, New Arabian Nights, to the last short novel published in his lifetime, The Ebb-Tide. All his best-known novels are covered, as well as a selection of his lesser-known works. The focus is on the works themselves, rather than on Stevenson's admittedly fascinating life, which is touched on only so as to provide a context for his writing. It is arranged by the dates when the works were written, rather than when they were published, so as to provide an outline sketch of his career as a...

John Bunyan (1628-88) lived and wrote through some of the most turbulent years of political, social, and religious change in British history from civil war, through Commonwealth and Protectorate to the Restoration. Imprisoned for unlicensed preaching as a Nonconformist, Bunyan turned to writing to sustain his pastoral mission and composed some of the best-known, and most critically acclaimed, seventeenth-century texts, from his intensely moving spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, to the world famous allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's style fused vivid...

Located in a world wrestling with new concepts of what it means to be modern, this book forms a penetrating analysis of a mid-twentieth century English woman novelist, whose genius was compared to Tolstoy. Rosamond Lehmann's first book, Dusty Answer (1927), with its scandalous subject matter, made her a literary celebrity at the age of twenty-seven. Seen as the voice of a new generation, she became the centre of an artistic circle that included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Elizabeth Bowen. Lehmann's novels deal with the urgency of romance and the vicissitudes of young women in love, and...

This title offers a sustained and comprehensive discussion of the Jamaican writer, Olive Senior's extensive oeuvre, including poetry, short stories and socio-cultural writings published from the late 1970s onwards.

A clear overview and analysis of James Baldwin's life and work. This study provides an engaging overview and clear analysis of the fiction, non-fiction and drama of African- American writer James Baldwin (1924-1987). Whilst giving close attention to Baldwin's popular works such as Go Tell it on the Mountain and Another Country, it also explores other important but less well known themes and texts, including the use of the blues, masculinity, race, and sexuality.

This introduction to Waugh's complete fiction devotes a chapter to each of his novels in chronological order, providing a lucid outline of his creative and spiritual trajectory from carefree unbeliever to committed Catholic, from modernist to traditionalist, from comic satirist to ironic realist. The critical analysis of each novel is preceded by a biographical introduction with an unprecedented focus on apparently trivial experiences in Waugh's life which had a significant impact on the themes, images, and structures peculiar to that novel. Waugh always rated his linguistic and structural...

An exploration and celebration of the writer who, for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing.

Browning has been identified as the greatest 19th century poet of human psychology, but the category most popular in his own time defined him as a poet of 'the grotesque'. In this book, John Woolford undertakes to specify the precise meaning and scope of this term, in the process placing him in a major aesthetic tradition running from the Romantic Sublime through to modern concepts and theorisations of the grotesque, such as the Bakhtinian. This study subsumes the other major critical discourse fertilised by his work, the 'dramatic monologue', but adds to that other notable features of it,...