Literature & Poetry

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 critical analysis highlights the extremism of Swiftian satire and its off page menaces.

Professor Watts's study examines the main phase in Joseph Conrad's literary development.

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.

This is a fascinating critical study of the work of Aphra Behn, probably the most inventive and original woman writer of the 17th century.

Presents a study that shows how, after extensive 'practice' in the Juvenilia, Bronte developed subtlety in the use of narrators, structure, language, imagery and allusion to create novels open to constant reinterpretation in print and on film.

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 explores the 'found' world of historical circumstance and the 'made' world of the imagination in Rushdie's fiction.

This study explores the 'found' world of historical circumstance and the 'made' world of the imagination in Rushdie's fiction.

This book treats separately all four poems: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain. There are also chapters on: the history of the poems and their rediscovery; The main emphasis falls on interpretation, and on such explanations as a modern reader may require. All quotations cited from the poems are translated as well.

Richard Todd's assessment of Byatt's literary identity treats the entire range of her writing from her earliest novels and essays to the present.

This study analyses Bainbridge's work in relation to some of the pressing debates in post-war literary studies.

This book, the first book-length study of D.M. Thomas' work, suggests that what troubles people about Thomas' work is the way it presents literature as a complex process of collaboration, translation, and improvisation.

In this study Barbara Hardy concentrates on Henry James' writing from 1900 to 1916, observing language and theme in close readings of The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Sacred Fount, the great ghost-story, The Jolly Corner and other tales, autobiography, travel and influential criticism.

This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats's major poems and letters.

This book highlights the ways in which Amis' novels remind us that fiction can be as engaging and immediate as television and film, but also that the medium of language is more effective than either of these in its ability to consume our anxieties, doubts and pleasures.

Drawing on recent feminist and literary scholarship, Jane Moore plots the tensions in Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female independence, mapping her ambivalence about sexual matters onto her quest for love.

This study critically explores satire's dominant literary forms and examines the work of its outstanding practitioners.

This text charts Sir Walter Scott's development as a poet and novelist.

This study looks at new ways of exploring the Piers Plowman's complex allegorical form and argues for the text to be read as a far-reaching critique of the social and sacred models that were the foundation of Langland's world.