The poetry of late-Victorian writer Mary Coleridge (1861-1907) is often startling and idiosyncratic, challenging and disturbing. Over the course of a quarter of a century, Coleridge wrote nearly 250 poems-lyrics, ballads, dramatic monologues, sonnets, elegies and occasional verse-which engage with issues as wide ranging as the politics of relationships and the position of women, religious doubt and spiritual experience, nature and the urban space, history, war, art and creativity.

This Reader's Guide analyses the critical history of two major nineteenth-century novels by the popular Victorian author Thomas Hardy, from the time of their publication to the present. Simon Avery explores how different generations of readers and critics have responded to the texts and maps out the ways in which various critical and theoretical schools have deployed differing - and often contradictory - interpretative strategies towards them. The ideological complexities of film and television adaptations of the two works are also considered, as are possible future developments in Hardy...

When a goose crashes onto their roof, the lives of Oswald, a fame-seeking opossum, and his best human friend, shy, ten-year-old Joey, are turned upside down. Oswald's persistent attempts at stardom alienate all his friends, human and animal, and threaten to ruin Joey's life when his mother is wrongfully arrested for animal cruelty. Horrified into thinking about someone other than himself, Oswald enlists three raucous raccoons and a sarcastic cat to put things right.