Bøger i Writers and their Work serien

Andrew Murphy charts the trajectory of Heaney's career as a poet and places his work within its various contexts.

Describing The Temple as ... 'not simply a collection of poems but ... a record of the spiritual struggles of a man of intellectual power and emotional intensity who gave much toil to perfecting his verses ...' T.S. Eliot considered Herbert's religious verse above John Donne's and placed him firmly in the ranks of the great English poets.

'The excellent explanatory notes extend the book's audience to non-specialists.Recommended.'T. Hoagwood, Choice

This book draws together the different aspects of Margaret Drabble's narrative practice, and looks at the increasing flexibility of her narrative methods, both in terms of the kind of narrator used and in the structuring of plot events.

Concentrating mainly on the novels from 1960 to the present day Amanda Greenwood contests critical perceptions of O'Brien as a narrow chronicler of women's inner lives, arguing that O'Brien's writings are not only radical but deeply revealing of the position of women under patriarchy in Ireland and beyond; the later texts suggest the need for revisions of the social and symbolic orders.

The new series of Writers and Their Work continues a tradition of innovative critical studies introducing writers and their contexts to a wide range of readers. Drawing upon the most recent thinking in English studies, each book considers biographical material, examines recent criticism, includes a detailed bibliography, and offers a concise but challenging reappraisal of a writer's major work. Dorothy Richardson is a major modernist novelist, only now beginning to attract the critical attention she deserves. In her time she was regarded as a pioneer, the originator of narrative 'stream of consciousness', her exploration of a woman's consciousness comparable to Proust. In this innovative study, Carol Watts reads her extraordinary thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage in its context, as a difficult record, a 'screen memory', of the impact of modern urban life on a new woman gradually emerging from the domestic constraints of Victorian tradition. The book draws on Richardson's short fiction and for the first time assesses the significance of her contributions to the avant-garde film journal, Close Up. Richardson's attempt to forge an adequate language for the representation of women's experience in modernity leads her to the public space of silent cinema. This study offers an exciting challenge to common readings of literary modernism, and a powerful argument as to why Dorothy Richardson is not Virginia Woolf.

An illuminating and lucid study which examines the psychological and stylistic aspects of Djuna Barnes's work, including her modernist classic Nightwood, providing a stimulating introduction to a bold and enigmatic writer in the literary Paris of the 1920s and 1930s

The book's focus is the major satires upon which Swift's literary reputation principally rests, including A Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal and the infamous scatological poems.

In this study Emma Smith teases out instances of doubleness, duplication and paradox in Othello.

Concentrating on her most recent collections, this introduction to Canada's greatest short-story writer shows how Munro uses fluid concepts of time to subvert notions of a single fixed reality.

This book is a concise introduction, drawing on the latest research, to the life and work of the most celebrated English poet of the late seventeenth century.

This close and sensitive study shows Christopher Smart (1722-1771) to be one of the finest and most important English religious poets between George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

This literary study is an exploration and a celebration of a writer who for the last half century has been at the forefront of modern African writing.

Colin MacCabe's study places T.S. Eliot's poetry in the context of his journeys from philosophy to poetry and from modern scepticism to traditional Christianity, and uses Eliot's life to illuminate his poetry.

This study offers a close reading of each of Swift's novels, exploring the innovative formal strategies and identifying such recurrent themes as the presence of the past in the present, the blurring of distinctions between 'history' and 'story', fact and fiction, and the possibilities of redemption in a contemporary social and emotional wasteland.

This study offers an informative account of the development of Beckett's prose and drama.

This book illuminates the importance of the inter-relationship between emotion and religion in the poetry of three women poets: Felicia Hemens, Dora Greenwell and Anne Procter of the Romantic and Victorian eras.

This study examines the whole of Frame's output starting with the fiction (novels, short-stories and poems) before focusing on the two autobiographical novels, Owls do Cry and Faces in the Water, to end with the autobiographical trilogy, a sort of restorative prism inviting us to (re) read all her preceding works.

A study of the lives of and works of Anna Barbauld and Mary Robinson.

This study explores the role of ethnicity in Fowles's novels, and his treatment of the past in The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot.

This study provides an accessible introduction to the whole range of Iris Murdoch's fiction, exploring philosophical, theological, political, social and biographical influences and her experimentations with the novel form.

Widely popular throughout the world, Hardy still seems to speak to us, in fiction and in poetry, as our contemporary. In this new edition of his popular study, Peter Widdowson identifies the elements in his work which enable Hardy to be read in this way: the focus on unstable class and sexual relations in a society undergoing rapid change;

This thorough study initially discusses Kipling's ambivalent knowing attitude to unknowable otherness, his rhetorical imitations of Indian and demotic vernaculars, his work ethic and ideal of imperialist masculinity, thus contextualising the central discussion of his masterpiece Kim which, almost uniquely, takes Indian otherness as a source of pleasure not anxiety.

R.K. Narayan, an Indian novelist who wrote in English, is a key figure in postcolonial literature. This introduction to his work explores his background, his politics, his attitude toward modernity and his skill as a storyteller, providing a detailed study of his life and fiction.

This study locates Norman MacCaig in his literary and social contexts and presents his work according to its major emphases.

This book offers the general reader an introduction to some of the most exciting poetry of recent years.

In this lucid and wide-ranging critical study, poet and critic David Kennedy charts Douglas Dunn's career from his debut volume Terry Street (1969) to his New Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2003).