Literary Collections

Seventy-seven tales of the supernatural, intended to frighten and excite and bring to heel their medieval audience, gathered from medieval chronicles, sagas, heroic poetry and romances.

Strongly recommended. M R JAMES NEWSLETTER

Stories of restless spirits returning from the afterlife are as old as storytelling. In medieval Europe ghosts, nightstalkers and unearthly visitors from parallel worlds had beenin circulation since before the coming of Christianity.
Here is a collection of ghostly encounters from medieval romances, monastic chronicles, sagas and heroic poetry. These tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still make the hair stand on end. Look at the story of Richard Rowntree's stillborn child, glimpsed by his father tangled in swaddling clothes on the road to Santiago, or the sly habits of water sprites restingas golden rings on the surface of the river, just out of reach.
The writer and broadcaster Andrew Joynes brings together a vivid selection of these tales, with a thoughtful commentary that puts them in context and lays bare the layers of meaning in them.

The letters of Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808) illuminate the career and opinions of one of the most prominent and controversial clergymen of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His petitions for liberalism within the Church of England in 1772-3, his subsequent resignation from the church and his foundation of a separate Unitarian chapel in London in 1774 all provoked profound debate in the political as well as the ecclesiastical world. His chapel became a focal point for the theologically and politically disaffected and during the 1770s and early 1780s attracted the interest of many critics of British policy towards the American colonies. Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price were among Lindsey's many acquaintances.
The second and final volume of this edition covers the period from the regency crisis and the early stages of the French Revolution to Lindsey's death nineteen years later, at the height of the Napoleonic War. His letters from this period reveal in depth Lindsey's central role in the formation of Unitarianism as a distinctive denomination, his involvement in movements for religious and political reform, his close friendship with Joseph Priestley and the tribulations of dissenters during the 1790s. From his vantage point in London, Lindsey was a well-informed and well-connected observer of the responses in Britain to the French Revolution and the war of the 1790s, and he provides a lucid commentary on the political, literary and theological scene.

As with Volume I, the letters are fully annotated and are accompanied by afull contextual introduction. G.M. DITCHFIELD is Professor of Eighteenth-Century History, University of Kent at Canterbury.

A crucial year in the Britten/Auden relationship, which reshaped and redefined artistic direction in the immediate pre-war period.

Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden were key figures of the 1930s, and here Donald Mitchell traces their lives during one crucial year, 1936. They worked hard to establish themselves, first through the GPO film unit, in a collaboration which flowered and spilled over into the theatre, and then radio - a new medium that the liveliest creative minds of the time were exploring and exploiting.

Britten and Auden also joined forces in works destined for the recital room and concert hall, among them Our Hunting Fathers, the political symbolism of which Donald Mitchell examines in depth, and On the Island, settings of early Auden that comprised Britten's first important set of songs to English texts. Much use is made of Britten's private diaries, which he kept on a daily basis, and a revealing portrait emerges of the two men's relationship, of their work together in many different fields, and of the reflection within that work of political ideas current at the time.

DONALD MITCHELL was Britten's close friend and publisher from 1964 until the end of the composer's life, and his authorised biographer. The T S Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered in 1979

The great vogue in Victorian times for matters Arthurian owes much to the poetry of Matthew Arnold and William Morris. Unlike Tennyson, however, neither of these poets is now remembered primarily for his Arthurian poems; as a result there is no modern anthology devoted to this area of their output. This is a major gap which the present volume seeks to rectify. Arnold's Tristram and Iseultis the first modern English retelling of the Tristram legend,a melancholy interpretation of the theme, reflecting the poet's pessimism about his own age; Morris's different approach - the rich sensuality of his The Defence of Guenevere and other poems -clearly reveals the allure thatthe middle ages held for the pre-Raphaelites.

Collected edition of Masefield's Arthurian poetry including previously unpublished material. Introduction by the author.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a homeless runaway teenager in New York found a job in a bar and discovered Malory. So began the lifelong interest of the future Poet Laureate, John Masefield (1878-1967), in the story of KingArthur. After becoming a popular, successful narrative poet and playwright, Masefield turned to the Arthurian material in earnest, producing the verse drama Tristan and Isolt in 1927 and Midsummer Night a year laterwith its Arthurian cycle.
All29 of Masefield's previously published Arthurian poems from the Ballad of Sir Bors (1903) to Caer Ocvran (1966) are collected here in addition to the full-length tragi-comedy When Good King Arthur. Also included are nine poems never before published which, together with prose notes, reveal Masefield undertaking an ambitious retelling of the Arthurian myth.

The adaptation of Late Latin grammars from the schools of the Roman Empire for use in a foreign Christian society culminated in the British Isles in the 7th and 8th centuries in the development of two distinct types of grammar designed respectively for elementary and for more advanced students. These works, whether they take the form of elaborate commentaries on the classical grammarians, or of simple collections of paradigms, reflect the reading and intellectual preoccupations of their authors, the first teachers in the West to face the problem of large-scale formal foreign-language teaching. The influence of the Insular grammarians extended far beyond their own time: their works,taken to the Continent by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, shaped both the latinity and the pedagogical technique of their pupils the Carolingians, and their influencein foreign-language teaching has persisted until our own time.