Bøger i Writers and their Work serien

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

This study focuses on the work of George Meredith, putting them in context to show how innovatively this versatile writer shaped and reshaped his material, and how powerfully his inimitable voice still resonates with (and challenges) us in the twenty first century.

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.

This lucid study of Geoffrey Chaucer addresses both recent theoretical approaches to his work, as well as various popular tropes - 'Father of English Poetry', poet of 'Merrie England' - that have enshrined his status within a nationalist ideology. Feminist criticism and the work of Bakhtin receive particular attention as two of the most prominent concerns in recent Chaucer studies, and new readings that reconsider the political and social context of his writings are also discussed. In his stimulating re-evaluation of a wide range of Chaucer's work Steve Ellis gives full attention to the pre-Tales poetry, alongside the Canterbury Tales themselves.

This study seeks to provide a balanced view by approaching Rushdie's fiction in terms of its dual responsibility to the 'found' world of historical circumstance and the 'made' world of the imagination.

Using an innovative theory of the significance of the Globe's stage space, Penny Gay examines As You Like It's presentation of issues of power, sexuality, gender and genre.

This study considers Measure for Measure in relation to its historical contexts and contemporary relevance.

In this study of revenge tragedies - notably by Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, John Marston and John Webster - Janet Clare suggests that genres are not passively inherited, but made and re-made every time a new play is performed.

This new, invigorating and accessible study excitingly explores the substance and significance of J.G. Farrell's Empire Trilogy and assesses its damning and influential critique of British colonial rule.

This is the first study of Thomas Middleton to emphasise the significance of his collaborative relationships, and stresses in turn the intertextual elements of his plays, pageants, poems, and pamphlets.

This study of Henrik Ibsen delivers readings of ten of Ibsen's best-known plays including A Doll's House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler, and surveys Ibsen's total dramatic output, carefully situating his plays in his cultural, historical and intellectual contexts.

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).

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

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

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 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.

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