Key Concepts: Literature – serie

The volume provides readers with a clear introduction to English Renaissance literary texts. Concise but detailed entries are alphabetically arranged, providing a coherent overview of central issues in the study of writings of the Renaissance era. Cross-referencing and suggestions for further reading indicate connections between topics.

Introducing the dynamic study of a literary period stretching from 1900 to the Second World War, the book reflects the exciting mix of European avant-garde, writers of the Harlem Renaissance and regional voices within Britain. Three distinct sections explore the major concepts, themes and issues that characterise the literature.

An insight into a popular yet complex genre that has developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume explores the contemporary anxieties to which crime fiction responds, along with society's changing conceptions of crime and criminality. The book covers texts, contexts and criticism in an accessible and user-friendly format.

Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature provides an overview of the main themes, issues and critical perspectives that have had the greatest effect on postcolonial literatures. Discussing historical, cultural and contextual background, it contains selected work of some of the major writers from this period.

Key Concepts in Victorian Literature is a lively, clear and accessible resource for anyone interested in Victorian literature. It contains major facts, ideas and contemporary literary theories, is packed with close and detailed readings and offers an overview of the historical and cultural context in which this literature was produced.

Key Concepts in Romantic Literature is an accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, criticism and history of the culturally rich and politically turbulent Romantic era (1789-1832). The book offers a comprehensive and critically up-to-date account of the fascinating poetry, novels and drama which characterized the Romantic period alongside an historically-informed account of the important social, political and aesthetic contexts which shaped that body of writing. The epochal poetry of William Wordsworth, William Blake, Mary Robinson, S. T. Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, P. B. Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats, Felicia Hemans and Letitia Elizabeth Landon; the drama of Joanna Baillie and Charles Robert Maturin; the novels of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley; all of these figures and many more are insightfully discussed here, together with clear and helpful accounts of the key contexts of the age's literature (including the French Revolution, slavery, industrialisation, empire and the rise of feminism) as well as accounts of perhaps less familiar aspects of late Georgian culture (such as visionary spirituality, atheism, gambling, fashion, music and sport). This is the broadest guide available to late eighteenth and early 19th century British and Irish literature, history and culture.