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Barbara Hardy has concentrated on the late period 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 the influential criticism. She has been writing about James since the fifties and draws on long experience of teaching James – to addicts, hostile parodists, and persevering fiction-lovers fascinated by a demandingly extravagant and original novelist. She offers new readings of the major novels, and revaluation of the literary criticism in the context of later ideas, which James’s theory and practice anticipate. Her close analysis traces generative imaging-making and reflexive story-telling, following two dominant and complementary themes, the social construction of character, and creative imagination: James dramatises the power of environment, to dismiss essentialism and ask the key question ‘What shall we call the self?’; and he is a disturbing analyst of inner life, catching its fantasies, revisions, and speculations in self-referential language. This study of the most innovative of Victorian and Edwardian novelists will interest new and old Jamesians, novel-readers and students at all levels.

George Chapman (1559-1634) is the least known of the great Elizabethan dramatists—but he was much more than a dramatist. In his own day, his translation of Homer brought him acclaim (it was the first English translation). He was a lyric poet who competed with Marlowe and Shakespeare, and wrote a continuation for Marlowe's Hero and Leander; he also knew the poets and scientists of Ralegh's circle. In this 1977 study, M. C. Bradbrook attempts to present the entire range of Chapman's work in compact form for the first time.A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

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; the highly-charged and contradictory representations of women at the heart of this dangerously ‘metamorphic’ social process; the self-reflexive artifice of the writing itself as an aspect of Hardy’s ‘satiric’ worldview; his ironic humanism in the ‘new Dark Age’ of the modern world. Drawing on contemporary approaches to literary study in an accessible way, the author shows where this radical and destabilizing Hardy is to be located in the texts; and similarly seeks to recast our conception of Hardy the Poet by showing how preconceived and selective it is. For this edition, Professor Widdowson has updated the Select Bibliography and has also included a ‘Postscript’ on film and TV adaptation of Hardy’s fiction, since many newcomers to Hardy may these days experience his work for the first time in this medium. This lucid and engaging study offers a comprehensive guide to reading Hardy anew as a writer who continues to challenge our assumptions about art and life.

Best known for his sexually provocative Poems and Ballads (1866), Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was much admired throughout the 19th-century for his daring subject matter and superb poetic craftsmanship. After a decline in popularity in the twentieth century, his reputation has steadily recovered, and he is now becoming more widely read and studied. This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections: Poems and Ballads 1 (1866), Songs before Sunrise (1871) and Poems and Ballads 2 (1878), as well as a number of his most influential essays. Representative close readings of selected poems and essays reveal the often complex webs of reference and allusion which give his work depth and richness. Throughout, special emphasis is placed on the ways in which Swinburne challenges and compels his readers to move beyond their regular viewpoints to experience new insights and perspectives.

The late Cyril Fall’s preface to his critical guide, War Books (1930) noted that ‘the Great War has resulted in the spilling of floods of ink as well as of blood’. That flood reached its high-water mark in the years 1929-30. Professor Greicus takes the view that the social and political attitudes to war aroused by this mass of testimony have had the effect, even to this day, of obscuring the literary qualities of much of the writing of that period. In Prose Writers of World War I he examines the novels and reminiscences of those British authors whose works in his opinion merit more critical attention and appreciation than they have so far received.M. S. Greicus was Acting Head of the English Department at the University of Papua, New Guinea. He has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. His publications include a novel on the Cold War.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946), whose creative career spanned a half century between the late Victorian age and the dropping of the first atom bomb, was one of the most confidently prolific of modern authors. In this 1974 study, Kenneth Young reviews Wells's development first as a creator of scientific romances, then as a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction, and finally as a publicist and prophet of world affairs—the last being the most ephemeral category of his work.A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

John Betjeman (1906-1984) was Poet Laureate from 1972. In this 1974 study, John Press attempts to survey the full range of Betjeman's work over forty years. Press argues that Betjeman's prose writings present, with more force and coherence than is commonly recognized, a set of aesthetics and moral judgements all the more valid for being flexible and undoctrinaire.

John Arden (1930-2012) was a playwright who, although in no limiting sense a regional writer, recognizably belongs to that northern culture which has its roots in the Industrial Revolution and the coalfields. In this 1974 study, Glenda Leeming sketches Arden's roving and sturdily independent career to date and notes the contribution of his wife Margaretta D'Arcy as collaborator and director. Her essay examines the full range of Arden's plays, including some little-known early work and several pieces written for television. A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018), born in Trinidad of Indian parents before moving to Britain, defeated the attempts of critics to attach him to a particular belief, society, place, or race. Freed by immigration, he can aspire to a certain universality, using the human condition as his subject-matter; on the other hand, like so many of his central characters, he is free only in the sense of drifting, and the mainly comic mood of his earlier novels is overlaid in his later work by the sadness and realization of rootlessness. In this 1976 study, Michael Thorpe traces Naipaul's development and growth in stature as a novelist who is now recognized as being in a class by himself among Caribbean writers.

Edward Bond has been, since his controversial arrival on the theatrical scene in 1965, one of Britain's most distinctive and important theatre writers. This study examines his work, from The Pope's Wedding (1962) to Coffee (1995). It gives an overview of the development of his distinctive dramatic language and style, and looks at his experiments with various theatrical forms and genres. It examines, too, the ways in which Bond's insistence upon the necessity of the drama as an agent of social evolution have determined his development as a dramatist. There are sections which situate Bond's work within its wider theatrical and political contexts, and which explore his concerns with issues such as violence, technology and social evolution, as they are expressed in plays such as Saved (1965), and Lear (1971). The study also deals with Bond's continual dialogue with our cultural history.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a Whig politician and an historian, famous for his History of England, who came to fame through the immediate success of the critical and biographical essays which he was already contributing in his early twenties to the leading periodicals of the day.This 1976 study by Kenneth Young succeeds that of G. R. Potter in 1959. Young surveys Macaulay's many-sided achievement not only as an essayist, historian, and poet, but as an outstanding orator and debater, an able administrator, an exuberant talker, and an indefatigable and entertaining correspondent.A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was an essayist, critic, painter, and philosopher. In this 1977 study, R. L. Brett draws attention at the outset to the biographical standpoint which Hazlitt always adopts in his writings on literature and the arts, and recalls that Hazlitt considered the essay form as 'ideally fitted to approach life with a method that is concrete and particular, rather than a priori and theoretical'.A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer. @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;}@font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073732485 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}.MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-size:10.0pt; mso-ansi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}

Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599) was an English writer best known for his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). In this 1977 study, Alastair Fowler argues that Spenser’s work shows ‘an astonishing capacity to speak to’ the twentieth century.

Thomas Carlyle was indisputably one of the ‘Great Victorians’. As prophet and preacher concerning the most urgent public issues of his time, he wielded a commanding influence both upon his intellectual peers and his fellow-countrymen at large. He was a restless critic of society who, as The Times wrote of him, ‘denounced wealth without sympathy, equality without respect, mobs without leaders, and life without aim’. When a general reaction against Victorian ideals set in, Carlyle's forthright and authoritarian exhortations and his impatience with democratic solutions became less acceptable to the spirit of the time, and his readership declined, at any rate during the first half of the present century; but in recent years there has been a significant revival in the study of his writings. Dr Campbell's essay discusses Carlyle's penetrating insight into the nature of his age, and especially into the domination of society by machinery. He analyses Carlyle's highly individual style, with its roots in Scottish speech patterns and Biblical and Shakespearean allusions, its repetitive structure, and its oratorical impetus. He assesses the significance today of Carlyle's The French Revolution and other historical writings, and sees him as a writer who, although not a conventional church-going Christian, upheld the virtues of a Christian society and proved a powerful force for good in shaping the thinking of his troubled century.Ian Campbell, was Lecturer in English Literature at Edinburgh University, was born in Lausanne and educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities. He taught Victorian, modern and Scottish literature, and co-edited the Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Carlyle Letters. His own biography of Thomas Carlyle was published in 1974.

F. R. Leavis (1895-1978), one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, is described by Edward Greenwood in this 1978 essay as the greatest. This study touches Leavis's career at Cambridge during the early years of the English Faculty. Greenwood sketches the nature of other intellectual disciplines and influences which were prominent at that time, notably the Logico-mathematical, the Positivist, and the Marxist, and describes the opposition which Leavis encountered in pursuing his own methods and priorities in teaching. He pays special attention to New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation, and The Great Tradition, which he regards as Leavis's most important critical works, discusses the achievement of Leavis's famous periodical, Scrutiny, and surveys his later books and the evolution of his criticism of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

William Blake was a revolutionary poet and artist: "I know myself both Poet & Painter", he wrote. In his paintings he created visionary images that challenge conventional perceptions; in his poetry he joined words and images in the stunning form of the 'illuminated book', where verbal and visual depictions interact. As a Romantic poet and religious visionary, he questioned Romantic assumptions and rewrote Biblical tradition in a radical mythology for his own historical moment. He welcomed the eruption of the French Revolution and attacked Britain's wars against Revolutionary France, assaulting the social injustices of his day and critiquing the politics and psychology of power. Steve Vine's study introduces the full range of Blake's poetry and illuminated books from the early Songs to the late epics, and focuses on the socially radical and challenging nature of his art: on Blake's attempts to open the 'doors of perception' beyond limiting visions and ideologies—to what he called 'the infinite'.

Contrary to popular belief, Paul Scott was not a historical novelist in the realist tradition but a post-modernist who engaged with his readers in narrative of increasing self-consciousness and complexity. Having exposed the identity crisis of the twentieth-century male under army and post-war conditions, he moved on after the 1950's to explore the need for commitment memorably and often brilliantly against various backdrops. This phase culminated in his most frankly experimental novel, The Corrida at San Feliu (1964). However, India, where Scott had served during the war, still exerted a strong pull on his imagination. And in his tour de force The Raj Quartet (1966-1975), and its coda, Staying On (1977; Booker Prize, 1978), Scott found in one of the great upheavals of recent times what he had long been seeking - evidence of human being's capacity for moral integrity and love, even in the face of extraordinary challenges.