Mervyn Peake has been acclaimed as an author of fantasy and as an illustrator, but as yet has received little attention from literary critics. This book is the first to analyse all of Peake's works of fiction, including his two picture story books and novella as well as the Gormenghast series and Mr Pye. Alice Mills pinpoints the fictional quirks that render Mervyn Peake such a memorable fantasy writer, examining his literary works from Jungian, Freudian, Kristevan and post-Jungian perspectives. Stuckness in the Fiction of Mervyn Peake will be of interest to fantasy lovers and students of...

William Blake's literary works are characterized by a ceaseless dynamics constituted in the fierce interactions of the language, thought, and narrative of his myth. Highlighting the critical problems facing the linear approach that the study of Blake has adopted from the traditional methodology of Newtonian science, Jules van Lieshout argues that nonlinearity is the key to understanding Blake's prophecies. Throughout his discussions, Van Lieshout focuses on the relation of Blake's Generation and Eternity, which he identifies as Bakhtinian 'world views'. In Generation, existence is finalized...

Berryman's Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art offers scholars and students the first thorough and well-researched vehicle into John Berryman's epic poem The Dream Songs. Through a close reading of the text, an examination of the history of its criticism and some of Berryman's letters, notes, and pertinent manuscripts, Sam Dodson offers the reader a solid starting point to appreciate the presiding structure and thematic focus of this American classic. This structure, resulting from the poet's crafting and the poem's internal growth, is illustrated in the text by more than thirty...

Most of the essays in Ritual Remembering: History, Myth and Politics in Anglo-Irish Drama, in part or in whole, frequently allude or directly concern themselves with the dramatic representation of the opposition or the collusion of myth and history, and the uses and abuses of both. Equally they celebrate and critically analyse the politics of the social conscience and social consciousness which pervades Irish drama in its rituals of forgetfulness and memory. Perhaps myth is above all to be understood as the conscience and consciousness of history; and politics is the projection of that myth...

The interest of Anglo-Irish literature is not only that its canon includes a high proportion of literary giants - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett - but also that it exemplifies the problematics of literature in a context of social and cultural tension. Irish literary history has often been studied under precisely that aspect: as the literature of a country in a marginal, colonial yet intra-European position; a country where a variety of cultural traditions (Gaelic, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Presbyterian) have coexisted in an uneasy relationship; a country with intense social and economic divisions. These...

By showing that the meaning of the word politics can be interpreted in various ways, the scope of the articles in Tumult of Images: Essays on W.B. Yeats and Politics is extensive. Rather than explicitly analysing W.B. Yeats's political views and opinions about social order, several of the authors demonstrate how these ideas have determined the textual strategy behind Yeats's works. Thus we find, for instance, how Yeats's politics of myth subsume the myth of politics, or how his play The Player Queen is an expression of sexual and textual politics. Other essays revaluate Yeats's role in...

Paradigms Found is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, and for anyone interested in the diverse ways in which his plays are read and taught at the start of the twenty-first century. It traces the paradigm shift in Shakespeare studies which, beginning in the 1970s, has foregrounded the playwright's embeddedness in the material practices and ideological constructs of his time, and focussed on the conflicts, gaps and faultlines in early modern society. The book concentrates on feminism and new historicism as the two critical schools that have brought about significant...

While there is overwhelming evidence that nationalism reached its peak in the later nineteenth century, views about when precisely national thinking and sentiment became strong enough to override all other forms of collective unity differ considerably. When one looks for the historical moment when the concept of the nation became a serious - and subsequently victorious - competitor to the monarchic dynasty as the most effective principle of collective unity, one must, at least for England, go back as far as the sixteenth century. The decisive change occurred when a split between the dynastic...

A Thesaurus of Old English is conceptually arranged, and presents the vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon England within ordered categories. This allows the user to approach the materials of the Thesaurus by subject rather than through an alphabetic index as is the case for many thesauri. The provision of brief indications of meaning at all levels of this scheme allows word-senses to follow on from ideas explained, so that this thesaurus incorporates information about word meaning and could be described as an inside-out dictionary, with meanings first and then words. In addition to providing...

These papers reflect the long and distinguished career of Professor Jane Roberts in the field of medieval English studies, and especially her pioneering work on A Thesaurus of Old English, which provides novel source material for several of the contributions to the volume. Many of the papers deal with aspects of early lexicology and lexicography, while others focus on linguistic and literary features of Old and Middle English texts and their interpretation. They will thus be of interest to researchers in many areas of early English. A special introductory article describes the interlinked...