William Wordsworth: Interviews and Recollections collects and reprints, on a generous scale, selections from the texts of both immediately recorded opinions and characterizations that were written down in later years. Represented in this anthology are 22 of Wordsworth's most important contemporaries. With the exception of Shelley, they all knew Wordsworth personally. It was difficult, and perhaps impossible, for any of them to write neutrally or objectively about the impression that Wordsworth made on them. Their comments make for lively reading.

Sir Walter Scott defined the parameters of the historical novel and illustrated his concept of the genre by writing a long series of novels dealing with medieval times, the Elizabethan Age and the 18th Century. Later novels written by his contemporaries and successors attracted smaller audiences. When Robert Louis Stevenson, in the early 1880s, enthusiastically expanded the boundaries of romantic fiction, he became a standard-bearer and an inspiration to many of his fellow-novelists: Walter Besant, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stanley John Weyman,...

Like other volumes in the series, this chronology presents major events of the subject's life in a readily accessible format to provide scholar and general reader with quick guides to dates, people and places. This volume focuses on the main facts of the life and career of Rudyard Kipling.

This book is a study of the development of the Victorian short story, which by the 1890s and the appearance of the Sherlock Holmes stories, had become the most popular literary product of the late nineteenth century. The book examines the work of nine distinguished writers: William Carleton and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu serve to illustrate the change from a largely oral tradition to a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the reading public. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope exemplify significant changes in the relationship between an author and his audience. Thomas Hardy...