To Build a Shadowy Isle of Bliss

A powerful reappraisal of radicalism in the life and work of William Morris.

Canada to Ireland

Canada to Ireland explores the poetry and prose of twelve Irish writers and nationalists in Canada between 1788 and 1900. The book demonstrates that Canadian cultural nationalism left its mark on both countries. Contemporary decolonization movements in Canada and cultural exchanges between Irelan...

David Lodge and the Tradition of the Modern Novel

An engaging study of one of the most popular contemporary British novelists.

Psychedelic Prophets

Letters between the men who coined the term "psychedelic" and opened doors to a different way of thinking about human consciousness.

The Edge of the Precipice

Kafka wrote that a book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within us: does that idea resonate with readers today?

The Watch that Ends the Night

George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to have...

North American Gaels

A groundbreaking exploration of the literature and folklore of North America's Irish and Scottish Gaelic-speaking diaspora since the eighteenth century. North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

Around 1945

How novels expanded human and legal rights in the age of the atomic bomb.

The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields

Carol Shields received both the Pulitzer Prize and the Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her novel The Stone Diaries. Yet she also wrote hundreds of poems over the span of her career. This collection includes three previously published collections and over eighty unpublished poems, ranging...

Little Resilience

Creating a national literature through a series of original poetry booklets.

The Modern Dilemma

Leon Surette's new study of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase.

With Your Words in My Hands

Following Antonietta and Loris's first kiss in the shadows of the Italian Alps barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the couple's courtship was separated by a distance far greater than could ever have been imagined. Throughout their transatlantic separation, the young lovers fervid...

Race Riots

From Black Mischief to The Buddha of Suburbia, twentieth-century British fiction is rife with racial humour. Challenging the common reluctance to take such comedy seriously, Michael Ross shows how humour directed at ethnic "others" exposes deep-seated national attitudes. Race Riots explores the d...

D.H. Lawrence and Attachment

Using concepts from attachment theory, D.H. Lawrence and Attachment presents innovative readings of Lawrence’s fiction. Ronald Granofsky teases out hidden patterns in Lawrence’s work, deepening our understanding of his fictional characters and revealing new significance to key thematic concerns l...

The Selected Essays of Sean O'Faolain

The first collection of essays by one of the most important public intellectuals in Ireland.

Writing Lovers

Is it possible to capture something as ephemeral as love with mere words? Méira Cook draws on Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and Kristeva to wrestle with the theoretical problems of representing the unrepresentable. In Writing Lovers she searches for a language adequate to articulating the discourse of...

Stranger Gods

In Stranger Gods Roger Clark offers an ambitious and wide-ranging study of Salman Rushdie's seven published novels, with a special focus on his earliest, Grimus, and his most powerful and provocative, Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. Clark shows how Rushdie employs cosmology, m...

Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics

Elizabeth Sauer brings a new perspective to Milton scholarship through her examination of the relative status and authority of the multiple narrative voices in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. She argues that Milton's epics accommodate a variety of interpretive voices, episodes, and dramatic ...

The Polliticke Courtier

Michael Dixon applies rhetorical theory to The Faerie Queene, highlighting the importance of rhetoric and locating the inventio, or organizing principle, of Spenser's epic narrative in the conception of justice. He demonstrates how Spenser adapts classical rhetoric to the poetics of romance-epic ...

The Mystic Leeway

Who is Frances Gregg? In her youth she was a poet in her own right, a friend of Ezra Pound, and an intimate of Hilda Doolittle and John Cowper Powys. In our literary history, particularly the history of Modernism, she has been a mysterious presence. Now, with this publication for the first time o...

Fear's Folly/(Les demi-civilises)

Superbly rendered by the late John Glassco, Harvey's controversial work is presented in its true cultural and social setting. First published in 1934, this novel satirizing the bourgeois élite and the suffocating rule of the Catholic clergy created a furor in Quebec.

Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson's Clarissa

Gordon Fulton provides a fascinating new study of styles in Samuel Richardson's masterpiece, Clarissa, connecting the style the characters deploy in their speech and letters with their positions in society. Fulton argues that the novel is a critical examination of the relationship between languag...

Jewish Presences in English Literature

In a collection of insightful critical essays, Derek Cohen, Deborah Heller, and the contributing authors explore the different ways in which writers of English literature have amplified, varied, or denied this archetypical perception.

Honest Sins

Originally cruel, manipulative, and self-serving, during the eighteenth century the Restoration rake evolved into a more cheerful sinner: the good-natured libertine. While Tom Jones was Henry Fielding's most complete embodiment of this new ideal, Tiffany Potter shows that the revised Georgian lib...

The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture

Romantic Aversions

Romanticism is often regarded as a turning point in literary history, the time when writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge renounced the common legacy of poets and sought to create a new literature. Yet despite their emphasis on originality, genius, and spontaneity, the first-generation Romanti...

Engendering the Republic of Letters

In Engendering the Republic of Letters Susan Dalton analyses the lives of four of the most famous salon women in France and the Venetian republic in the late eighteenth-century - Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini all lived through ...

Germany as Model and Monster

In Germany as Model and Monster Gisela Argyle details allusions in English novels to German social, cultural, and political life. Such allusions serve as criticism of English life and of English conventions of fiction. Beginning her study with Thomas Carlyle's "Germanizing" efforts in the 1830s a...

Challenging Canada

In Challenging Canada Gabriele Helms examines novels by Jeannette Armstrong, Joy Kogawa, Daphne Marlatt, Sky Lee, Aritha van Herk, Thomas King, and Margaret Sweatman. As resistance literature, these novels question the idea of a homogeneous Canadian culture based on the idea of "a peaceable kingd...

Finnish Folk Poetry - Epic

The Quest for Rananim

Milton's Leveller God

David Williams advances a progressive and democratic interpretation of Milton's epics to show they are more relevant than ever. He traces echoes between Milton's texts and Leveller writings that advocated for popular rule, extended suffrage, and religious tolerance, arguing that Milton's God is s...

Kingsley Amis

Uncovering Kingsley Amis's hidden artistic agenda.

The Birth of New Criticism

A groundbreaking account of the origins of the twentieth century's most influential method for studying poetry.

Irving Layton and Robert Creeley

The events covered by the letters collected here start with Robert Creeley's discovery of Irving Layton and focus on the turbulent circumstances surrounding the publication (by Creeley's Divers Press in Majorca) of In the Midst of My Fever, Layton's first book of poems not published at his own ex...

Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future

An apocalyptic vision of planetary self-destruction provided the context for many late twentieth-century narratives. Women writers from Quebec and English Canada, including Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine Gagnon, Betsy Warland, Marie-Claire Blais, and Nicole Brossard, re...

A Catalogue of the Burney Family Correspondence, 1748-1878

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad

Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad is a structural and thematic analysis of early modern British fiction with an intellectual foundation consisting of political theory, sociology, and philosophy. Key theoreticians include Charles Darwin, Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Karl Mannh...

The Road to Egdon Heath

Many people spend considerable sums of money on arduous trekking holidays in frozen wastelands or through scorched deserts. These places, which would once have been considered cursed and avoided at all cost, are now sought out or seen as the epitome of a

Stages and Playgoers

Stages and Playgoers demonstrates the long, vital tradition of dialogue between stage and audience from medieval, through Tudor, to Jacobean drama. Janet Hill offers new insights into techniques of addressing playgoers from the stage and how they might have operated under particular staging condi...

Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Places in Langland's Poetics

In Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and Their Place in Langland's Poetics John Chamberlin helps readers of Piers Plowman understand some of the most characteristic and inventive elements of Langland's work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Chamberlin brings together an examination of Lang...

The Letters of Brendan Behan

Brendan Behan -- a Dublin playwright, fiction writer, and poet -- made a deep impression on British theatre during the 1950s. As a young man he made a similar impression on Irish prisons, spending a number of years in them for the cause of Irish republicanism. Throughout his life he continued to ...

John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance

As a working-class poet, born in 1793 to an impovisherished family in rural England, John Clare has often been considered of interest for the unusual nature of his life and career rather than for his poetry. In this book, Johanne Clare argues that he should be taken seriously both as a poet and a...

Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde

It has always been difficult to determine Wyndham Lewis's position within the Modernist movement. Despite his status as one of the "big five" modernists -- along with W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce -- Lewis is the least read and least understood of significant modern English ...

Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s

In Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s Brian Diemert examines the first and most prolific phase of Graham Greene's career, demonstrating the close relationship between Greene's fiction and the political, economic, social, and literary contexts of the period. Situating Greene alongside other y...

What the Thunder Really Said

C.P. Snow and the Struggle of Modernity

The condition of modernity springs from that tension between science and the humanities which had its roots in the Enlightenment but only reached the height of its impact with the rise of twentieth-century technology. It manifests itself most notably in a crisis of individuality generated by the ...

The Birth of Modernism

In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.

Conrad's Later Novels

Authors and Audiences

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the best-selling fiction of Ralph Connor, Robert Stead, Nellie McClung, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Arthur Stringer was internationally recognized. In this intriguing cultural history of the conception, production, and reception of popular fiction, Clarence Karr ch...

A Manner of Correspondence

A Manner of Correspondence examines one of the most interesting of literary clubs, the Scriblerus Club, made up of the talented satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. Patricia Brückmann explores the Scriblerians as a ...

William Blake in the Desolate Market

The life of a brilliant poet, exquisite painter, and rotten salesman.

The Making of the Alice Books

The Making of the Alice Books includes discussions of the didactic and nursery-rhyme verse traditionally addressed by Carroll's critics while adding and elaborating connections established within and against the continuum of English-language children's literature.

The English Housewife

In 1615 Englishman Gervase Markham published a handbook for housewives containing "all the virtuous knowledges and actions both of the mind and body, which ought to be in any complete housewife."

The Making of the English Literary Canon

It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary C...

Kleist's Aristocratic Heritage and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn

William Reeve provides a detailed textual analysis of Heinrich von Kleist's drama Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, demonstrating that Kleist drew its poetic images, themes, and general atmosphere from the Prussian aristocratic class into which he had been born. Reeve's comprehensive re-reading of Käth...

Henri Bergson and British Modernism

Mary Ann Gillies shows that French philosopher Henri Bergson played a central role in the development of British literary modernism. While Bergson's influence on modernism has long been debated, this is the first thorough, current examination of the ways in which his ideas are manifest in British...

Rereading Middle English Romance

Focusing on features of layout and decoration in manuscripts containing Middle English romances, Murray Evans discusses how these details signal generic and structural relationships among texts. Using a computer-assisted survey to tabulate and quantify features of decoration and presentation in f...

Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works

Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works is an exploration of the rich but relatively neglected prose works of Dylan Thomas. Ann Mayer examines Thomas's changing conceptions of language and the creation of meaning as revealed in his numerous self-referential acts of writing and telling.

Enabling Engagements

An insightful reading of Edmund Spenser, demonstrating his poetic and political stance through his engagements with patrons.

The Complete Plays of Frances Burney

This two-volume set of the comedies and tragedies of Frances Burney (1752-1840) reveals her remarkable, yet little-known, talent as a dramatist. Compiled from the original manuscripts, it includes a substantial general introduction, headnotes to each play, explanatory notes, and variant readings.

Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference

Thackeray's The Newcomes has been described as one of the richest of Victorian fictions. In Thackeray's Cultural Frame of Reference, R.D. McMaster unveils the magnitude of this richness.

Labour, Love, and Prayer

Labour, Love, and Prayer explores the construction of female stereotypes during a period of mounting religious tension in Ireland by examining the central role played by Protestant and Catholic women in establishing the religious faith of their children a

Edgar Allan Poe

Critics have often charged Edgar Allan Poe with sloppy writing. Using stylistics and classical rhetorical theory, Brett Zimmerman demonstrates that Poe was in fact a brilliant and deliberate lexical technician who varied his prose style according to genre and the world views and the mental health...

Swinging the Maelstrom

Swinging the Maelstrom is a collection of new critical essays on the work and life of Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). An international group of literary critics and artists examines a wide range of Lowry's work from the diverse perspectives of biography, correspondence, translation, manuscript editing...

Kleist on Stage, 1804-1987

Until now, there has been no general reference work that describes the various stagings of Kleist's plays since the first performance of Die Familie Schroffenstein in 1804. Several dissertations dealing with the stage history of individual works appeared between 1920 and 1932 and some articles di...

Chaucer and Language

Geoffrey Chaucer is increasingly recognized as a writer whose work is particularly congenial to modern tastes. The essays in Chaucer and Language are at the forefront of present-day interest in Chaucer as a highly self-conscious manipulator of language and theorist of signification in the broades...

Imagined Nations

An in-depth look at the effects of change in modes of communication on imagined forms of political community through an examination of a series of Canadian novels and film adaptations.

The Picturesque Prison

This study of the life and works of Evelyn Waugh traces the novelist's pursuit of his vocation and his long retreat from a world which he came to regard as a spiritual dungeon. Jeffrey Heath explores the paradoxical elements in Waugh's career: his quest for a refuge itself proved to be a prison a...

The Poet and the Critic

These letters give a unique glimpse into publishing history in Canada and tell a human story of two Canadian men of letters, one in his prime, the other at the end of his life.

Sexual Enjoyment in British Romanticism

How British Romantic writers reimagined sexual enjoyment and invented psychoanalysis in the process.

Ancestral Recall

A comparative modernist study of the connections between Irish and Japanese literature, opening up uncharted avenues of cross-cultural exchange.

Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

Many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children demanding. In his close reading of the novel, Neil ten Kortenaar offers post-colonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children that also challenge some of the prevailing in...

Tyendinaga Tales

Tyendinaga Tales is a collection of previously unrecorded Mohawk folktales gathered from residents of the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve near Bellville, Ontario. The folktales are told infrequently on the reserve and are in danger of disappearing completely. The stories are accompanied by pen and ink ...

Sincere Ideal

Transformation of Sin

The Mind in Creation

The Mind in Creation celebrates the career of Ross G. Woodman, one of Canada's finest teachers and critics. During his more than forty-one years in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario he has profoundly influenced scores of graduate and undergraduate students. From his i...

Four Contemporary Novelists

Four Contemporary Novelists offer accounts of the fiction of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V. S. Naipaul. The author has charted the development of each writer; identified dominant themes, controlling techniques, and informing sensibility; explained what each has tried to accomplish...

Becoming Sui Sin Far

Newly discovered works by one of the earliest Asian North American writers.

Listening to Old Woman Speak

While Canadian First Nations writers have long argued that non-Native authors should stop appropriating Native voices, many non-Native writers have held that such a request constitutes censorship. "Listening to Old Woman Speak" provides the historical context missing from this debate. Laura Groen...

Tales for an Unknown City

Tales for an Unknown City is a vibrant selection of almost fifty stories from among the many told at One Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling, a weekly open gathering in Toronto begun by Dan Yashinsky in 1978 and still going strong. There are tales from Canada and many other parts of th...

Carlyle and the Economics of Terror

Thomas Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose - the bane of every reader who has attempted to come to terms with his works - has often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncrasies. Mary Desaulniers, however, argues that Carlyle's language is a deliberate strategy ...

Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature

A rich collection of writing - poetry, prose, and drama - from some of the greatest Australian Aboriginal authors.

Fresh Strange Music

A new approach to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's art through the music of her poetry and its social and political implications.

Flexible Design

Vala or The Four Zoas is one of William Blake's few surviving manuscripts and affords a unique opportunity to examine a significant evolution in his poetic practice. While the poem itself exhibits a consistent thematic interest, the modes and methods of representing these interests underwent a ra...

The Return of the Sphinx

The works of a seminal Canadian writer, available again.

Essays for Richard Ellmann

Richard Ellmann's scholarly work is notable for its striking liveliness and clarity and its genuine illumination of the writers and works with which he dealt. His life of James Joyce, published in 1959, received more commendation and critical praise than any previous literary biography.

Chaucer, Spenser, Milton

What's the Import?

Two conspicuous features of the radical transformation of literary studies over the past three decades have been the dominance of theory-based interpretative discourse and cultural studies contextualizations. Both have greatly energized literary studies - but they have done so at a cost.

TransCanadian Feminist Fictions

A cutting-edge feminist study of borders and transnational ethics in Canadian literature since the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Mirror of the Worlde

An authoritative and comprehensive edition of the first known English translation of the first atlas of the world.

Devouring Time

Exploring the way filmmakers who adapt Shakespeare’s plays are fuelled by nostalgia.

This Strange Loneliness

This Strange Loneliness is the first comprehensive account of the poetic relationship between Seamus Heaney and William Wordsworth. Peter Mackay explores how Heaney repeatedly turns to the Romantic poet's work for inspiration, corroboration, and amplification, and as a model for the fortifying po...

General Consent in Jane Austen

Readings of Jane Austen tend to be polarized: she is seen either as conformist - the prevalent view - or quietly subversive. In General Consent in Jane Austen Barbara Seeber overcomes this critical stalemate, arguing that general consent does not exist as a given in Austen's texts. Instead, her t...