Literary Lives – serie

A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time.

This Literary Life draws extensively from the playwright's correspondences, notebooks, and archival papers to offer an original angle to the discussion of Williams's life and work, and the times and circumstances that helped produce it.

Linda Wagner-Martin brings a wealth of new information to this detailed portrait of Hemingway and his world, concentrating particularly on his friendships with women and the history of his four marriages.

This volume on Blake follows the writer's life and combines biography and critical analysis. Covering Blake's early career, his major works and his work as a visual artist, this new study will be a must for all Blake scholars and enthusiasts. Recent discoveries concerning Blake's forebears and their religion make this new study additionally timely.

At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the context of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death.

The most sustained criticism and ambitious theory that had ever been attempted in English, the Biographia was Coleridge's major statement to a literary culture in which he sought to define and defend all imaginative life. This book offers a reading of Coleridge in the context of that culture and the institutions that comprised it.

How was Ted Hughes's poetry affected by Sylvia Plath? What is the importance of his early life on the Yorkshire moors with his elder brother, that he called Paradise? How did writing Birthday Letters affect his attitude to his life and career? This book attempts to answer these questions by a close study of Hughes's poetic development.

By the time of her death in 1992, Angela Carter had come to be regarded as one of the most successful and original British authors of the twentieth-century, and her writing has subsequently become the focus of a burgeoning body of criticism.

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony. The book includes an original account of the gender politics of Spenser's work and his difficult position between Ireland and England, the 'homes' about which he held ambivalent feelings. Waller also discusses the 'place' the biographer occupies in writing a literary life.

This account of Orwell's life is chiefly concerned with what influenced Orwell, his relations with publishers and editors, and the analysis of certain key experiences - the deposition that during the Spanish Civil War he was guilty of espionage and high treason; his work at the BBC; his interest in pamphlet literature; and his time as a war correspondent. There is a detailed assessment of his earnings from 1922 to 1945 and a fresh look at his attitudes to class, women, and religious belief. Special attention is paid to his essays.

Thomas Hardy in the Literary Lives series relates Hardy's life to his career as a writer, giving particular attention to his determination as a young man to make literature his career, his methodical preparation during the first thirty years of his life for that career, the writing of his fourteen published novels and the fame they brought him, and then, the culmination of his life as writer, his emergence in his remaining thirty years as one of the very greatest of English poets and the writer of The Dynasts.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies. Machann challenges the popular image of Arnold as an elitist intellectual and shows how his poetry and prose grew out of his personal life and his passionate engagement with the world, emphasizing the journal publications that drove his career as a literary, social and religious critic.

Waugh's life and his literary life exist in fascinating, dynamic relationship. Virtually all of his fiction was autobiographical, yet he maintained that his novels were 'objects', unrelated to the life of their author. This study traces the shifting relationship of ascertainable fact and imaginative fiction throughout Waugh's career, focusing on the endless negotiation he conducted between life and art, and on why, from being author of the anarchic, hilarious Decline and Fall , he transformed himself into the author of the romantic, eschatological Brideshead Revisited .

This comprehensive overview of Mary Shelley's life as an author frequently reads like an anthology of extracts from some of the most lurid and sensationalist novels of the early 19th century.

Emphasizing Frances Burney's professionalism and her courage, Janice Farrar Thaddeus shows the protean writer who recognised her abilities and exercised them, always carefully shaping her career.

This is not a straightforward biography but rather an attempt to describe and examine Yeats as a phenomenon, partly shaped by forces and movements around him and partly shaping the public events of his time. His position in literary, political and cultural matters is detailed and the book offers, through the study of Yeats, an introduction to the fashions of ideas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This new book on the Brontes concentrates on the way in which the literary interests and expressions of Charlotte and Emily were built up. It makes use of recent research into background and reading matter to investigate the development of the authors' poetry and novels.

This new book on the Brontes concentrates on the way in which the literary interests and expressions of Charlotte and Emily were built up. It makes use of recent research into background and reading matter to investigate the development of the authors' poetry and novels.

This study does not set out to deal with all aspects of Donne's life and work. Rather, it aims to examine selected aspects of the life and work in the context of the times Donne lived in, seeking to emphasise those features which are most alive in our times. Particular emphasis is placed upon the period between Donne's marriage in 1601 and his ordination in 1615. The last period of his life and its main literary product, the sermons, are treated more briefly while the treatment of the early years is limited by the gaps in the surviving evidence. Both his poetry and his prose are seen less in purely aesthetic terms therefore, than as products of a difficult life lived at a difficult time.

For the first time in an approachable, affordable volume this study treats the whole literary career of England's most distinguished protestant-republican poet and writer, considering the miscellaneous output in the light of contexts and political functions. It highlights self-presentational and persuasive characteristics, pays attention to the sense of vocation and also describes Milton's distinctive achievement in social genres. Milton's competitive humanist training is seen to accomodate uneasily to the specific demands of some public works. The book features unfamiliar texts, whilst canonical texts are set in the story of his long endeavours during a turbulent period in English history.

This is a lively and authoritative guide to the life Pope called 'a warfare upon earth'. Dr Rosslyn gives a sympathetic portrait of the poet who overcame the obscurity of his origins and the embarrassment of his deformity to become the uncrowned laureate of his age - and also make the largest literary fortune since Shakespeare's. She describes the mixture of passion and pragmatism that created poetry out of a legion of enemies (and a wide circle of distinguished friends), and pays tribute to the professionalism of a poet who thought no sacrifice too great for his art.

This comprehensive account of the writing life of Henry James aims at providing a critical overview of all his important writings, firmly set in two contexts: that of James's practical career as a novelist in America, England, and Europe;

This work relates Hardy's life to his career, his methodological preparation during the first 30 years of his life for that career, the writing of his 14 published novels and the fame they brought him. It also offers a culmination of his life as a writer.

This work relates Hardy's life to his career, his methodological preparation during the first 30 years of his life for that career, the writing of his 14 published novels and the fame they brought him. It also offers a culmination of his life as a writer, his emergence in his remaining 30 years as one of the very greatest of English poets and the writer of "The Dynasts".

Throughout his long working life, Tennyson was experimenting with new forms and subjects. Widely read in a range of disciplines, he responsed to many of the personalities, events and discoveries of the Victorian age. Still widely regarded as an apologist for the 'establishment', Tennyson was always an outsider. Scourged by reviewers, and haunted by his own nervous disposition, Tennyson endured years of despair. Even when the tide turned in 1850 Tennyson remained a stern critic of his contemporaries.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life. The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley a poet was the 'combined product' of 'internal powers' and 'external influences' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life Michael O'Neill gives a knowledgeable and balanced account of Shelley's literary career from his earliest published work to his last unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life. The book draws on recent research about the poet and his age, but its sense of the ways in which texts and contexts interact is sharply independent. Issues discussed include Shelley's social background, his radical politics and his complex response to Enlightenment rationalism. O'Neill stresses Shelley's often disappointed search for an audience, connecting it with the growing sophistication of his poetry and poetics. For Shelley a poet was the 'combined product' of 'internal powers' and 'external influences' (Preface to Prometheus Unbound); this book explores how such a combination manifests itself in his own writings.

Taking advantage of the biographical material on Eliot which has appeared in recent years, this book is an assessment of his career as poet and critic, and of the contrary impulses which shaped it. It examines how a Missouri-born American became the most prominent English man of letters of his lifetime, and explores the elements of rebellion and conformity, secrecy and openness, which manifest themselves in Eliot's life and work.

John Dryden was England's most outstanding and controversial writer for the last four decades of the seventeenth century. He dominated the literary world as a satirist, a skilled and versatile dramatist, a pioneer of literary criticism, a writer of religious poetry, and an eloquent translator from the great classical poets.