Literary Criticism

Surrealist women’s writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers’ work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment.

Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Césaire, Unica Zürn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet.

Zadie Smith’s fiction reimagines subjectivity, relationality, and the conditions of contemporary life.

This book offers a timely reassessment of her work, addressing identity, urban experience, and the category of the human. Moving beyond postcolonial and multiculturalist readings, it brings psychoanalytic, historical, symptomatic, and cultural materialist perspectives to bear across her novels, stories, essays, and plays. The collection explores how Smith’s characters, shaped by diverse backgrounds and settings, challenge fixed ideas of Britishness and personhood. It argues that her writing opens up a new ontological space—defined by fluid identities, shifting subjectivities, and evolving forms of relationality.

By reconsidering both the human and the spatial in Smith’s work, the book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary literary criticism and to current thinking on narrative, identity, and urban life.

The idea of the end is an essential motivic force in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill (1932–2016). This book shows that Hill’s poems are characteristically ‘end-directed’. They tend towards consummations of all kinds: from the marriages of meanings in puns, or of words in repeating figures and rhymes, to syntactical and formal finalities. The recognition of failure to reach such ends provides its own impetus to Hill's poetry.
This is the first book on Hill to take account of his last works. It is a significant contribution to the study of Hill's poems, offering a new thematic reading of his entire body of work. By using Hill's work as an example, the book also touches on questions of poetry's ultimate value: what are its ends and where does it wish to end up?

A compelling tour of Shakespeare’s England that makes a powerful contribution to the 'authorship question'.

How do we know Shakespeare was Shakespeare? Could a glover’s son who left school at fifteen really be the author behind such masterpieces as Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest?

Yes! says historian Susan Amussen. She transports readers back to early modern England, to travel the path that carried William Shakespeare from humble origins in Stratford to literary greatness on the London stage. This was a society undergoing rapid change. Grammar schools made education in Latin and Greek available to commoners, while touring players brought the latest dramatic productions to the masses. And in London, a metropolis filled with European visitors, ordinary people had the opportunity to see courtly life up close.

No serious historian doubts that Shakespeare was the author of the plays that bear his name. Susan Amussen shares what they know: that Shakespeare’s England was a complex and cosmopolitan place, with everything a talented young playwright needed to develop his craft and furnish his imagination.

A profound exploration of the connection between poetry and suicide.

‘Suicides have a special language’, Anne Sexton wrote in her 1964 poem ‘Wanting to Die’. But is it a language we can learn to read?

In The poetry of suicide, J. T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths. Beginning with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’, he delves into the work of Dante, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide’s messy reality.

Suicide is more like poetry than we realise, Welsch argues. Both are filled with ambiguities, contradictions, and unknowable intentions. Both demand and resist interpretation. Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our medicalised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide’s poem-like difficulties.

Over the last twenty-five years, the ‘history of emotion’ field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature — in particular secular literature — as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past.

The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences — those who read them or hear them read or performed?

Modern readers mostly know Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in its complete ‘old’ version, but it is the New Arcadia (published in 1590), a revised version of his pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, that was the most influential and most widely imitated literary text of the sixteenth century. Preserving the basic plot, New Arcadia adds further narrative strands and introduces ambitious revisions, demonstrating Sidney’s brilliance as a prose writer.

This edition of the New Arcadia is the first in nearly four decades, preserving the text of Victor Skretkowicz’ celebrated 1987 edition, whilst making the text accessible through modern spelling and supplementing it with a substantially expanded scholarly commentary, an updated glossary, and additional long notes on the book’s history and Sidney’s use of rhetorical devices, as well as his contributions to the English language.

In the period between the Second World War and the present, there has been an extraordinary rise in the production of medievalist fantasy literature and film. This has been accompanied by the revival, performance and invention of medieval music. In this enterprise modern fantasies of the Middle Ages have exercised great influence.
Fantasies of music in nostalgic medievalism shows how music, medievalism and nostalgia have been woven together in the fantasies of writers and readers, musicians, musicologists, directors and listeners, film-makers and film-goers. This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval – musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception – have worked together to produce and sustain, for some, the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

This original and innovative book proposes ‘dismemory’ as a new form of intertextual engagement with Shakespeare by modern and contemporary Irish writers. Through reflection on these canonical writers and ranging across thirteen Shakespeare plays, Taylor-Collins demonstrates how Irish writers who helped to fashion and critique the Irish nation state carry an indelible, if often subdued, mark of Shakespeare’s early modern English influence.

The volume overall renews and revitalises the Shakespeare–modern Ireland connection: Taylor-Collins reveals Hamlet’s hauntological legacy in Playboy of the Western World, Ulysses, and Ghosts; how the corporal economies that exert pressure from Coriolanus and Ben Jonson flicker through to the antiheroes in Beckett’s Three Novels; and how the landed legacies of territorial contests in Shakespeare are engaged with in Yeats’s poetry, and similarly how the diseased muddiness in Hamlet is addressed by Heaney.

Shakespeare’s adolescents examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of ‘signs’ associated with an individual’s physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different ‘signs’ of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories.
By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare’s adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent’s state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare’s celebrated characters and actors.

A fascinating exploration of the early modern authors who helped to shape Shakespeare’s beloved plays.

Shakespeare’s plays have influenced generations of writers, but who were the early modern playwrights who influenced him?

Using the latest techniques in textual analysis, Darren Freebury-Jones offers a fresh look at William Shakespeare and reveals the influence of a community of playwrights that shaped his work. He makes a compelling case that we need to see early modern drama as a communal enterprise, with playwrights borrowing from and adapting one another's work.

From John Lyly's wit to the collaborative genius of John Fletcher, to Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's borrowed feathers offers fresh insights into Shakespeare’s artistic development and shows us new ways of looking at the masterpieces that have enchanted audiences for centuries.

What do #MeToo and Jane Austen have in common? More than you might think.

Ever since the novel was invented, women have used it as a platform for sharing ideas about sexual consent. Dr Zoë McGee reveals how Jane Austen, Frances Burney and their now-overlooked contemporaries used their stories to try to change society’s mind about rape culture – and to reassure survivors they were not alone.

Courting Disaster takes a timely deep-dive into a series of classic novels, comparing them with both historic court records and current events to show that our arguments about consent are not a new phenomenon. With the wit and wryness of a courtship novel, McGee reads between the lines to unveil a quiet feminist movement that still resonates today. Because every novel about marriage is also a novel about consent.

In an era that’s clamouring for a return to the values of the past, Courting Disaster asks what that would really mean, and whether anyone actually liked it back then anyway…

This book offers a comprehensive account of the methods and practice of learning modern languages, particularly Italian, in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. It is the first study to suggest that there is a fundamental connection between these language-learning habits and the techniques for both reading and imitating Italian materials employed by a range of poets and dramatists, such as Daniel, Drummond, Marston and Shakespeare, in the same period.

The widespread use of bilingual parallel-text instruction manuals from the 1570s onwards, most notably those of the Italian teacher John Florio, highlights the importance of translation in the language-learning process.

This study emphasises the impact of language-learning translation on contemporary habits of literary imitation, in its detailed analyses of Daniel's sonnet sequence 'Delia' and his pastoral tragicomedies, and Shakespeare's use of Italian materials in 'Measure for Measure' and 'Othello'.

Between earth and heaven examines the teaching of the theology of Christ’s ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature, offering the only comprehensive examination of how patristic ascension theology is transmitted, adapted and taught to Anglo-Saxon audiences. This book argues that Anglo-Saxon authors recognise the Ascension as fundamentally liminal in nature, as concerned with crossing boundaries and inhabiting dual states. In their teaching, authors convert abstract theology into concrete motifs reflecting this liminality, such as the gates of heaven and Christ’s footprints.

By examining a range of liminal imagery, Between earth and heaven demonstrates the consistent sophistication and unity of Ascension theology in such diverse sources as Latin and Old English homilies, religious poetry, liturgical practices, and lay popular beliefs and rituals. This study not only refines our evaluation of Anglo-Saxon authors’ knowledge of patristic theology and their process of source adaptation, but also offers a new understanding of the methods of religious instruction and uses of religious texts in Anglo-Saxon England, capturing their lived significance to contemporary audiences.

The interest in aesthetics in Philosophy, Literary and Cultural Studies is growing rapidly. 'The new aestheticism' contains exemplary essays by key practitioners in these fields which demonstrate the importance of this area of enquiry.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

John Kinsella explores a contemporary poetics and pedagogy as it emerges from his reflections on his own writing and teaching, and on the work of other poets, particularly contemporary writers with which he feels some affinity.

At the heart of the book is Kinsella's attempt to elaborate his vision of a species of pastoral that is adequate to a globalised world (Kinsella himself writes and teaches in the USA, the UK and his native Australia), and an environmentally and politically just poetry. The book has an important autobiographical element, as Kinsella explores the pulse of his poetic imagination through significant moments and passages of his life. Whilst theoretically informed, the book is accessibly written and highly engaging.

Harriet Martineau responds to the strong revival of interest in her life and writing, exploring Martineau’s controversial views through her innovative use of popular cultural forms—journalism, travel writing, didactic fiction, novels, translation, autobiography and history. This is the first collection of essays to revisit and reassess Martineau’s leading place in Victorian culture and in the development of nineteenth-century liberalism. Distinguished contributors—including Isobel Armstrong, Lauren Goodlad, Catherine Hall, Deborah Logan and Linda Peterson—offer critical analyses of her trailblazing career as a professional ‘woman of letters’.

The essays collected here move from personal to global concerns in Martineau’s oeuvre. The opening essays centre on her bold self-fashioning as a writer, while the second section focuses on the domestic complexities of laissez-faire liberalism in her economic and social vision. Finally, the volume analyses her provocative writings on race, Empire and history – from Atlantic slavery to the Indian Mutiny – demonstrating the international breadth and impact of a remarkable career.

How Japanese is Ishiguro?
What role does memory and unreliability play in his narratives?
Why was The Unconsoled (1995) perceived to be such a radical break from the earlier novels?. The first complete study to consider all of Ishiguro's work from A pale view of the hills (1982) to When we were Orphans (2000), including his short stories and television plays. Explores the centrality of dignity and displacement in Ishiguro's vision, and teases out the connotations of home and homelessness in his fictions. Invaluable for students at all levels, especially as The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro is a set text at GCSE and A Level.

This book offers a comprehensive account of the methods and practice of learning modern languages, particularly Italian, in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England. It is the first study to suggest a fundamental connection between language-learning habits and the techniques for both reading and imitating Italian materials employed by a range of poets and dramatists, such as Daniel, Drummond, Marston and Shakespeare, in the period.

The widespread use of bilingual parallel-text instruction manuals from the 1570s onwards, most notably those of the Italian teacher John Florio, highlights the importance of translation in the language-learning process.

This study emphasises the impact of language-learning translation on contemporary habits of literary imitation, in its detailed analyses of Daniel's sonnet sequence 'Delia' and his pastoral tragicomedies, and Shakespeare's use of Italian materials in 'Measure for Measure' and 'Othello'.

Shakespeare's history plays have always been pivotal to our understanding of his works. This collection renews attention to these crucial plays by exploring official and unofficial versions of the past, histories and counter-histories in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By exploring the diversity of Shakespeare’s engagement with history in all its forms, these contributors open up a range of new interpretive possibilities for understanding the way history ‘plays’ with the past.

The book is divided into three sections: Memory and mourning, Counter-histories, Identity and performance. In each section, leading theorists, historicists and performance critics offer fresh perspectives on the key issues that are transforming our understanding of Shakespeare. These include: gender and violence, the mapping of Britain, cultural memory and religion.

This collection will appeal to all critically engaged readers of Shakespeare. In particular it will command wide-ranging interest from undergraduates, postgraduates, academic researchers and students of early modern theatre, history and culture.

This book explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the Middle Ages to the present day has stood up for the values of natural law and true justice. Analysing the whole sequence of Robin Hood adventures, it begins with the medieval tradition, including early poems and the long-surviving sung ballads, and goes on to look at two variant Robins: the Scottish version, here named Rabbie Hood, and gentrified Robin, the exiled Earl of Huntington, now partnered by Lady Marian.

The nineteenth century re-imagined Robin as a modern figure – a lover of nature, Marian, England and the rights of the ordinary man. In novels and films he has developed into an international figure of freedom, while Marian’s role has grown in a modern feminist context. Even to this day, the Robin Hood myth continues to reproduce itself, constantly discovering new forms and new meanings.

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction.

McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.

Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

This book explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the Middle Ages to the present day has stood up for the values of natural law and true justice. Analysing the whole sequence of Robin Hood adventures, it begins with the medieval tradition, including early poems and the long-surviving sung ballads, and goes on to look at two variant Robins: the Scottish version, here named Rabbie Hood, and gentrified Robin, the exiled Earl of Huntington, now partnered by Lady Marian.

The nineteenth century re-imagined Robin as a modern figure – a lover of nature, Marian, England and the rights of the ordinary man. In novels and films he has developed into an international figure of freedom, while Marian’s role has grown in a modern feminist context. Even to this day, the Robin Hood myth continues to reproduce itself, constantly discovering new forms and new meanings.

What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? Show me the money documents how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. It tells the story of how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money, from the South Sea Bubble to our current crisis.

Show me the money sets out the history and politics of representations of finance through five essays by academic experts and curators, and is interspersed with provocative think pieces by notable public commentators on finance and art. The book, and the exhibition on which it is based, explore a wide range of images, from satirical eighteenth-century prints by William Hogarth and James Gillray to works by celebrated contemporary artists such as Andreas Gursky and Molly Crabapple. It also charts the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts and electronic trading systems.

This updated and expanded analysis of King Lear in performance includes new chapters on the television version of the Royal National Theatre production directed by Richard Eyre and starring Ian Holm; and on Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran'. Earlier chapters provide close, detailed analyses of the stage, film and television interpretations of John Gielgud, Harley Granville Barker, Paul Scofield, Peter Brook, Peter Ustinov, Michael Gambon, Adrian Noble, Grigori Kozintsev, Michael Hordern, Jonathan Miller, Laurence Olivier and Michael Elliott.

By examining such issues as the playing of Lear, the staging of the storm and the battle, and the choice of historical period, this book shows how interpretation and performance are bound together, and how the play is transformed through different historical and political contexts.

This will be essential reading for students in English, drama or film at any level, theatregoers, and anyone involved in productions of the play.

These essays by senior scholars in medieval studies celebrate the career of J.J. Anderson, editor, critic, and co-founder of the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture series, who taught in medieval studies at the University of Manchester for forty years.

The essays are rooted in medieval literature but frequently range beyond the confines of the Middle Ages. They reflect the breadth of Anderson's own scholarly interests, especially in drama and Arthurian literature. There is a particular focus on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, poems which preoccupied him throughout his scholarly life. There are also new reconsiderations of La?amon's Brut, Mirk's Festial, the Passion plays, and the manuscripts of the Pore Caitif. Moving beyond the traditional purview of medieval literature, several contributors trace the afterlives of medieval themes in later literature. These essays include a consideration of the twinned trajectories of the medieval heroes Robin Hood and King Arthur from medieval literature to modern television, a comparison of La?amon's Brut and Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and a recreation of the Bishop Blase procession which took place in industrial Bradford.

Contributors are Rosamund Allen, Ralph Elliott, Alexandra Johnston, Stephen Knight, Peter Meredith, Susan Powell, Gillian Rudd, Alan Shelston, and Kalpen Trivedi.

Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites is a much-needed volume that brings together ten original papers by the experts, on the relations between Spenser and Shakespeare. There has been much noteworthy work on the linguistic borrowings of Shakespeare from Spenser, but the subject has never before been treated systematically, and the linguistic borrowings lead to broader-scale borrowings and influences which are treated here. An additional feature of the book is that for the first time a large bibliography of previous work is offered which will be of the greatest help to those who follow up the opportunities offered by this collection.

Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites presents new approaches, heralding a resurgence of interest in the relations between two of the greatest Renaissance English poets to a wider scholarly group and in a more systematic manner than before. This will be of interest to Students and academics interested in Renaissance literature.

John Ford is best known as the author of the controversial *Tis Pity She’s a Whore*, but his other plays are also full of interest. The Lady’s Trial, his last play, encapsulates the final development of his own unique theatrical aesthetic whilst looking back to the drama of his youth, most notably Othello, whose story is here rewritten.

In Ford’s version, the supposedly wronged husband, the victorious general Auria, does not simply take the word of his friend, the well-intentioned but overly suspicious Aurelio, that his wife, Spinella, is unfaithful: instead he does what Othello apparently never even thinks of doing, and conducts a rational, public sifting of the apparent evidence, at the end of which Spinella is triumphantly cleared. In combining this story of public vindication with his distinctive dramatic style of delicate reticence, Ford offers a powerful exploration of both the capabilities and the limitations of language and its role in human relationships.

The first scholarly edition of this undeservedly neglected play situates it in its dramatic and historical contexts and helps elucidate Ford’s understated, allusive style.

Balancing long-overlooked and well-known works from early modern England, Same-sex desire in early modern England, 1550–1735: An anthology of literary texts and contexts is a collection of English texts about homoerotic love, relationships, desires, and sexual acts.

The anthology’s core texts are selections from works of drama, fiction, romance, poetry, essays and translation. These core texts are carefully introduced and annotated, and supplemented with illuminating contextual material from other early modern disciplines such as law, medicine, and theology. Juxtaposing literary and non-literary representations of same-sex erotic desire, this anthology explores a rich tradition of works both celebrating and condemning same-sex erotic love, focusing on a balance between the period’s well-known homoerotic works, such as Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and those which have remained much more obscure, such as Catherine Trotter’s heroic drama Agnes de Castro.

This book is the first ever concordance to the rhymes of Spenser’s epic. It gives the reader unparalleled access to the formal nuts and bolts of this massive poem: the rhymes which he used to structure its intricate stanzas.

As well as the main concordance to the rhymes, the volume features a wealth of ancillary materials, which will be of value to both professional Spenserians and students, including distribution lists and an alphabetical listing of all the words in The Faerie Queene. The volume breaks new ground by including two studies by Richard Danson Brown and J. B. Lethbridge, so that the reader is given provocative analyses alongside the raw data about Spenser as a rhymer. Brown considers the reception of rhyme, theoretical models and how Spenser’s rhymes may be reading for meaning. Lethbridge in contrast discusses the formulaic and rhetorical character of the rhymes.

Scholars of Edmund Spenser have focused much more on his accomplishments in epic and pastoral than his work in satire. Scholars of early modern English satire almost never discuss Spenser. However, these critical gaps stem from later developments in the canon rather than any insignificance in Spenser's accomplishments and influence on satiric poetry. This book argues that the indirect form of satire developed by Spenser served during and after Spenser's lifetime as an important model for other poets who wished to convey satirical messages with some degree of safety. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton and George Wither, to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Newly available in paperback, this collection of essays, written by distinguished international scholars, focuses on the structural influence of Italian literature, culture and society at large on Shakespeare's dramatic canon. Exploring recent methodological trends coming from Anglo-American new historicism and cultural materialism and innovative analyses of intertextuality, the volume's four thematic sections deal with 'Theory and practice', 'Culture and tradition', 'Text and ideology' and 'Stage and spectacle'.

In their own views and critical perspectives, the individual chapters throw fresh light on the dramatist's pliable technique of dramatic construction and break new ground in the field of influence studies and intertextuality as a whole.

A rich bibliography of secondary literature and a detailed index round off the volume.

The heart of this book is its fully annotated, critical editions of the surviving work of Richard Edwards, one of the most influential poets and dramatists writing in England before Shakespeare. Ros King's extensive introduction, identifying the holes in the documentary evidence that might accommodate this important but now little known writer, rewrites the history of pre-Shakespearean drama, illustrates new approaches to sixteenth-century prosody and to the modernisation of dramatic poetry, and re-evaluates the public role of theatre and poetry during a particularly turbulent period in English history.

While it will be essential reading for specialist scholars, it will also be of much wider interest. The introduction is highly accessible which makes it an appropriate text-book for students in a field where few textbooks are available. It will appeal to the current appetite among the reading public for biography, while the play, poems and songs are themselves very appealing.

Richard Hillman applies to tragic patterns and practices in early modern England his long-standing critical preoccupation with English-French cultural connections in the period. With primary, though not exclusive, reference on the English side to Shakespeare and Marlowe, and on the French side to a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic material, he focuses on distinctive elements that emerge within the English tragedy of the 1590s and early 1600s. These include the self-destructive tragic hero, the apparatus of neo-Senecanism (including the Machiavellian villain) and the confrontation between the warrior-hero and the femme fatale.

The broad objective is less to 'discover' influences – although some specific points of contact are proposed – than at once to enlarge and refine a common cultural space through juxtaposition and intertextual tracing. The conclusion emerges that the powerful, if ambivalent, fascination of the English for their closest Continental neighbours expressed itself not only in but through the theatre.

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time.

Kesson traces Lyly's work in prose fiction and the theatre, demonstrating previously unrecognised connections between these two forms of entertainment. The final chapter examines how his importance to early modern authorship came to be forgotten in the late seventeenth century and thereafter.

This book serves as an introduction to Lyly and early modern literature for students, but its argument for the central importance of Lyly himself and 1580s literary culture makes it a significant contribution to current scholarly debate. Its investigation of the relationship between performance and print means that it will be of interest to those who care about, watch or work in early modern performance.

How might literary scholarship engage with the sustainability debate? Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in literary and environmental studies, this collection brings together twelve essays by leading and up-coming scholars on the theme of literature and sustainability. In today’s sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiquitous term, yet one potentially driven to near meaninglessness by the extent of its usage. While much has been written on sustainability in various domains, this volume sets out to foreground the contributions literary scholarship might make to notions of sustainability, both as an idea with a particular history and as an attempt to reconceptualise the way we live. Essays in this volume take a range of approaches, using the tools of literary analysis to interrogate sustainability’s various paradoxes and to examine how literature in its various forms might envisage notions of sustainability.

An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Fanon, postcolonialism and the ethics of difference offers a new reading of Fanon’s work challenging many of the reconstructions of Fanon in critical and postcolonial theory and in cultural studies, probing a host of crucial issues: the intersectionality of gender and colonial politics; the biopolitics of colonialism; Marxism and decolonisation; tradition, translation and humanism.
It will be of particular value to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as to academics interested in Fanon and postcolonial studies generally.

That devil’s trick is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siècle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms.

Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism, That devil’s trick will be an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.

This unique collection brings together essays by experts from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, education, journalism, creative writing and literary criticism, to offer new insights into the writer, his work and his legacy. Featuring a range of distinguished contributors, including Roy Foster, Paula Meehan, Frank McGuinness and Melvyn Bragg, along with a previously unpublished McGahern interview, the collection enhances the existing body of criticism, extending the McGahern conversation into new areas and deepening appreciation of the considerable achievements of this great writer.

The volume, which also features an original poem by Paula Meehan written in honour of McGahern, will stimulate the interest of students, researchers and general readers of Irish literature and culture.

This book offers a critical reassessment of the uses of history in contemporary Irish literature and culture. It argues that in much recent Irish writing, history is approached not as the proverbial ‘nightmare’ from which Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus tried to awake, but as a rich, imaginative resource. Drawing on recent debates in Irish literary and cultural criticism, On the uses of history in recent Irish writing explores the varied, creative, and often critically challenging forms of rewriting Ireland’s troubled past in contemporary prose, drama and poetry.

Individual chapters focus on literary treatments of the Tudor reconquest, the Famine, the Northern Irish Troubles and other key events in Irish history, highlighting in a series of close readings the unique forms of historical thought enabled by different literary forms and genres. Canonical works by authors such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Tom Paulin, Brian Friel, Stewart Parker and Frank McGuinness are considered alongside lesser known writers and texts, placing each in their wider social, cultural and historical contexts.

That devil’s trick is the first study of nineteenth-century hypnotism based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of the subject. Drawing on the reports of mesmerists, hypnotists, quack doctors and serious physicians printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the Victorian fin de siècle, the book provides an insight into how continental mesmerism was first understood in Britain, how a number of distinctively British varieties of mesmerism developed, and how these were continually debated in medical, moral and legal terms.

Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker and Conan Doyle among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of mesmerism, That devil’s trick will be an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.

Available in paperback for the first time, this important collection of essays illustrates the complexity, richness and diversity of the suffrage movement.

Combining historical reappraisal with lively accounts of the culture of the women’s suffrage movement, this volume offers a unique focus. It includes studies of the fascinating, but neglected groups that participated in the campaign: the Women’s Franchise League; the Women’s Freedom League; the Women’s Tax Resistance League and the United Suffragists. This is accompanied by feminist research on the poetry, fiction and drama that emerged from women’s struggle for the vote. In addition there are reappraisals of two leading figures in the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union, an illuminating analysis of the relationship between suffrage and sexuality, and a discussion of what happened away from the metropolis, as well as of the little known campaign to extend the vote after 1918.

In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction.

McEwan’s novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwan’s readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing.

Although McEwan’s later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwan’s prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists.

This genealogy of the 'odd woman' compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women’s fiction and auto/biography from the 1850s to the 1930s.

Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous, incomplete and threatening, yet were also hailed as ‘women of the future’. Before 1850 odd women were marginalised, minor characters in British women’s fiction, yet by the 1930s spinsters, lesbians and widows had become heroines. This book examines how women writers, including Charlotte Brontë, Elisabeth Gaskell, Ella Hepworth Dixon, May Sinclair, E. H. Young, Radclyffe Hall, Winifred Holtby and Virginia Woolf, challenged dominant perceptions of singleness and lesbianism in their novels, stories and autobiographies.

Drawing on advice literature, medical texts and feminist polemic, it demonstrates how these narratives responded to contemporary political controversies around the vote, women’s work, sexual inversion and birth control, as well as examining the impact of the First World War.

Irvine Welsh's fiction has defined an era, and this first full-length study provides a sustained textual and contextual analysis of all his work, from 'Trainspotting' and 'The Acid House' to 'Glue' and 'Porno'. A detailed chronological survey also considers the appropriateness of cultural, postmodern and postcolonial theories to Welsh's incendiary fiction.

Kelly gives a fascinating insight into the writer's formal and political ambitions, placing him in the context of the 'brat pack' which exploded onto the Scottish literary scene in the 1990s. He explores the social, class and political conditioning of Welsh's early life, and its impact on his motivations for writing.

Clearly written and accessible, this will be a key resource for students and academics alike. Choose 'Irvine Welsh'!