Steve Ellis – författare

This book is the most comprehensive guide to Chaucer's work and the history of its reception available. It comprises 37 specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding team of contemporary Chaucer scholars and combines general essays offering background and contextual information with detailed readings of specific Chaucerian texts. The volume is divided into five parts - 'Historical Contexts', 'Literary Contexts', 'Readings', 'Afterlife' and 'Study Resources'. Each chaper includes a Guide to Further Reading and there is a Chronology at the end of the volume. The Guide is accompanied by a companion web site which includes four additional contributions for teachers and lecturers on teaching and learning issues related to Chaucer.

Soils represent the result of a complex set of interacting processes and are an integral component of the environment. Yet soils remain the most undervalued and misused of the Earth's resources. This work examines the fundamental importance of soils. Combining practical analysis and interpretation with a theoretical approach, the authors discuss the properties of soils, debate the environmental factors that influence their development, and address their resulting spatial characteristics on a global scale. Examining the impact of environmental controls on soil formation this book also analyzes the role of soils as components of natural environmental systems, and soil-human interactions. A glossary of terms aids the less scientific reader. Adopting macro and micro-scale, pure and applied, spatial and temporal, and natural and human related approaches, this book offers an understanding of soils within an environmental context. As environmental problems, such as pollution, acidification, erosion and climatic change become matters of greater concern, this work offers an understanding for readers across a spectrum of environmentally-related subjects.

This book is a history of the influence of Dante on English poetry. The focus us not primarily upon stylistic influences or attempts to imitate Dante's manner of writing, but rather on the different guises in which the enormous presence of Dante has made itself felt, and how that presence has affected some of the central concerns of the poets in question. The poets considered are Shelley, Byron, Browning, Rossetti, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. In addition to analysing the way Dante is approached by these poets in their major poetry, Dr Ellis also discusses relevant critical works: Shelley's Defence of Poetry, Pound's The Spirit of Romance and Yeats' A Vision. The critical survey is unified by the attempt to show certain recurrent preoccupations in the work of these writers, such as the need to define a tradition in which Dante is a necessary forerunner. Ellis also shows that Dante has been read in a very partial way by these poets and the images of him which emerge in their works are inevitably varied and contradictory.

Criticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more 'Post-Victorian' than 'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future.

Steve Ellis shows how the Canterbury Tales has been radically opened up by modern critical theory. The book provides an introduction to a wide range of theoretical approaches to Chaucer, including the feminist, Lacanian, Bakhtinian, deconstructive, semiotic and anthropological schools.

This 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. Full allowance is paid to his Chaucer’s pre-Tales works, alongside the Canterbury Tales themselves.

This book considers the literary construction of what E. M. Forster calls 'the 1939 State', namely the anticipation of the Second World War between the Munich crisis of 1938 and the end of the Phoney War in the spring of 1940. Steve Ellis investigates not only myriad responses to the imminent war but also various peace aims and plans for post-war reconstruction outlined by such writers as T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, E. M. Forster and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He argues that the work of these writers is illuminated by the anxious tenor of this period. The result is a novel study of the 'long 1939', which transforms readers' understanding of the literary history of the eve-of-war era.

Criticism of Woolf is often polarised into viewing her work as either fundamentally progressive or reactionary. In this 2007 book, Steve Ellis argues that her commitment to anxiety about modernity coexists with a nostalgia and respect for aspects of Victorian culture threatened by radical social change. Ellis tracks Woolf's response to the Victorian era through her fiction and other writings, arguing that Woolf can be seen as more 'Post-Victorian' than 'modernist'. He explains how Woolf's emphasis on continuity and reconciliation related to twentieth-century debates about Victorian values, and he analyses her response to the First World War as the major threat to that continuity. This detailed and original investigation of the range of Woolf's writing attends to questions of cultural and political history and fictional structure, imagery and diction. It proposes a fresh reading of Woolf's thinking about the relationships between the past, present and future.

This new addition to the Longman Critical Readers Series provides an overview of the various ways in which modern critical theory has influenced Chaucer Studies over the last fifteen years. There is still a sense in the academic world, and in the wider literary community, that Medieval Studies are generally impervious to many of the questions that modern theory asks, and that it concerns itself only with traditional philological and historical issues. On the contrary, this book shows how Chaucer, specifically the Canterbury Tales, has been radically and excitingly 'opened up' by feminist, Lacanian, Bakhtinian, deconstructive, semiotic and anthropological theories to name but a few. The book provides an introduction to these new developments by anthologising some of the most important work in the field, including excerpts from book-length works, as well as articles from leading and innovative journals. The introduction to the volume examines in some detail the relation between the individual strengths of each of the above approaches and the ways in which a 'postmodernist' Chaucer is seen as reflecting them all.This convenient single volume collection of key critical analyses of Chaucer, which includes work from some journals and studies that are not always easily available, will be indispensable to students of Medieval Studies, Medieval Literature and Chaucer, as well as to general readers who seek to widen their understanding of the forces behind Chaucer's writing.

This book, first published in 1991, supplies a neglected cultural context for T. S. Eliot’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Four Quartets, and attempts to disprove the widespread belief in Eliot’s unproblematic commitment to England, and the ‘Englishness’. The book traces Eliot’s classicism not only in linguistic and formalist terms but also in his construction of England in the Quartets and Quartets-related essays. His practice is related to the vigorous polemic concerning the definition of England found in the 1930s and 1940s, in material as diverse as landscape painting, advertising, travel literature and the detective novel.This original and provocative text will not only be of interest to students and teachers of Eliot, but to those interested in representations of nationality.

This book, first published in 1991, supplies a neglected cultural context for T. S. Eliot’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Four Quartets, and attempts to disprove the widespread belief in Eliot’s unproblematic commitment to England, and the ‘Englishness’. The book traces Eliot’s classicism not only in linguistic and formalist terms but also in his construction of England in the Quartets and Quartets-related essays. His practice is related to the vigorous polemic concerning the definition of England found in the 1930s and 1940s, in material as diverse as landscape painting, advertising, travel literature and the detective novel.This original and provocative text will not only be of interest to students and teachers of Eliot, but to those interested in representations of nationality.

The narrator of The Bromsgrove Business, beset by hapless marital and familial relationships, is writing a novel about academic life which is gradually taken over by spirit communicators revealing the solution to the murder of a local cricketer in Bromsgrove in the 1930s… This intriguing mixture of the fantastic with the poignantly plausible will test your powers of deduction and keep you chortling!

Seething with tension in monsoon heat and humidity, Red on Green is a captivating story of love across cultural barriers, corruption, abuse of humanitarian aid and sexual exploitation.British aid worker, Ben Altringham, meets medical student, Ayesha, through her father, Dr Abdur Rahman. He is a kind and highly skilled doctor who volunteers to help people struggling to survive in desperate poverty and squalor.Ayesha and Ben's relationship is a dangerous liaison in the turbulent aftermath of a savage civil conflict on the Indian subcontinent. The war had ended. But recrimination and revenge were rife.Fuelling the danger, Ayesha's closest friend, Khalida, asks for help to escape the clutches of a government minister's son. She was being coerced into a suffocating marriage. Driven by his love for Ayesha, Ben risks his liberty and life in a plot to help Khalida flee the country.The novel is set in Bangladesh, a year after the nine-month civil war in 1971. Unfortunately, the nine-month 'War of Liberation' did not free the population from poverty, disease and natural disasters, nor endemic corruption, nepotism and discrimination. Former 'freedom fighters' took revenge against those accused of being traitors and collaborators during the conflict. Blood continued to flow into the new nation's lush landscape - hence the title, Red on Green.

Covers the priorities and challenges facing organisations who are increasingly focused on ‘knowledge work’; it is written from a human relations – rather than a technological - perspective. It uses real cases, backed up by evidence and analysis from a detailed study into strategic knowledge based working (KBW). The content of the book draws on two chief sources: the author’s own expertise in KBW developed over five years of blue chip KBW consultancy, and the results of a previously unpublished five year study. The book offers clear, step-by-step guidance to executives who need to understand, deploy and implement KBW.

T. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare, Marvell, Baudelaire and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christian belief and culture that his work becomes increasingly steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation and difference to the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematised by his work, so by taking his prose as a starting point helps to clarify his poetic writing. The guide also offers an overview of key critical debates concerning Eliot's work.

This is a concise and clear guide to the complexities of T. S. Eliot's poetry, with easy to follow structure and chapters on Eliot's major texts, all in chronological order. T. S. Eliot is one of the most celebrated twentieth-century poets and one whose work is practically synonymous with perplexity. Eliot is perceived as extremely challenging due to the multi-lingual references and fragmentation we find in his poetry and his recurring literary allusions to writers including Dante, Shakespeare; Marvell, Baudelaire and Conrad. There is an additional difficulty for today's readers that Eliot probably didn't envisage: the widespread unfamiliarity with the Christian belief and culture that his work becomes increasingly steeped in. Steve Ellis introduces Eliot's work by using his extensive prose writings to illuminate the poetry. As a major critic, as well as poet, Eliot was highly conscious of the challenges his poetry set, of its relation and difference to the work of previous poets, and of the ways in which the activity of reading was problematised by his work, so by taking his prose as a starting point helps to clarify his poetic writing.The guide also offers an overview of key critical debates concerning Eliot's work. "Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

When former British Army sniper Matty Fox takes a job at an oil refinery, he thinks he's leaving the battlefield behind. But a mysterious offer leads him into the remote Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, where the line between friend and foe is dangerously blurred.