This text offers a unique combination of English, European, American and Post-Colonial perspectives on literary study from the 1920s to the present day. Carefully introduced and arranged to highlight the development of debates, it is designed to engage newcomers to the field with some of the main themes and issues that will concern them as readers of modern literary texts of all genres.
In the second edition, there is an increased focus on questions of gender and identity and on recent debates, such as "Literature and Nation" and "Literature and Value." The reach and relevance of the book...

A succinct and informed account of the career and main themes of South Africa's leading dramatist by an authority in the field. Athol Fugard is widely recognised as one of the most important living dramatists, a total man of the theatre, whose work - individually and in collaboration with his black South African colleagues - has demonstrated the potential of art to bear witness to some of the most extreme events of our times. In this comprehensive critical study of his career over five decades, Dennis Walder asks how successfully the South African playwright's work continues the search for...

The importance of understanding Dickens's religion to obtain a full appreciation of his achievement has long been admitted; but this is the first critical study of the interaction between Dickens's religious beliefs and his creative imagination throughout his career. The novelist's religious beliefs are a pervasive and deeply felt presence in his works even if they are not always clearly thought out or expressed. Too discreet and humane to be as explicit, or as dull, as most of the professedly religious novelists of his time, Dickens nevertheless suggests in his own way a liberal Protestant...