Palgrave Literary Dictionaries – serie

A comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Byron, entries range from detailed coverage of the major poems to items on Byron's songs, conversation, interest in boxing, swimming and vampires, and sexual liaisons; also the 'Byronic Hero', Byron in fiction and drama, and his pervasive influence on subsequent literature.

This study aims to provide readers with a convenient source of reliable, scholarly, and accessible information on Chaucer's work, life, and times. Topics include Chaucer's works, major fictional characters, social, and political contexts, writers who influenced Chaucer or influenced by him, people and places of significance in Chaucer's life.

This comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Percy Bysshe Shelley features entries on all the major poems and prose works (including inspiration, composition and publication), Shelley's politics, relationships and travels, his representation in novels, drama, film and portraits, and his critical reception.

This study aims to provide readers with a convenient source of reliable, scholarly, and accessible information on Chaucer's work, life, and times. Topics include Chaucer's works, major fictional characters, social, and political contexts, writers who influenced Chaucer or influenced by him, people and places of significance in Chaucer's life.

It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels as The Last Man and Mathilda and her tales, reviews, travel writing and the (until recently neglected) Literary Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers.

This comprehensive guide to the poems, prose, biography, ideas and contexts of Percy Bysshe Shelley features entries on all the major poems and prose works (including inspiration, composition and publication), Shelley's politics, relationships and travels, his representation in novels, drama, film and portraits, and his critical reception.

Tennyson is the most important English poet of the Victorian age. He knew its key figures and was deeply involved in its science, religion, philosophy and politics. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary for the first time gives easily accessible information, under more than 400 headings, on his poetry, his circle, the period and its contexts.

This volume considers the work and life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). It looks not only at Frankenstein and its composition, sources, themes and reception but at the wide range of other work by Shelley including such novels as The Last Man and Mathilda and her tales, reviews, travel writing and the (until recently neglected) Literary Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French writers. There are detailed entries on her personal and/or literary relationship with her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Claire Clairmont; on her religion, feminism, politics, relation to Romanticism, portraits and representation in drama, film and television; and on the influence of her work on such writers as Poe, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Dickens and H.G. Wells.

Tennyson is the most important English poet of the Victorian age. He knew its key figures and was deeply involved in its science, religion, philosophy and politics. The Palgrave Literary Dictionary for the first time gives easily accessible information, under more than 400 headings, on his poetry, his circle, the period and its contexts.

The prose – critical, philosophical, political, religious – ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks.

This volume explores ‘the labyrinth of what we call Coleridge’ (Virginia Woolf): his poems and prose, their sources, interpretation and reception; his life, troubled marriage and fatherhood, conversation, changing intellectual contexts and legacy. Major entries cover such canonical works as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, ‘Kubla Khan’, the ‘conversation poems’ and Biographia Literaria. But a fuller understanding of Coleridge must embrace many lesser-known poems – lyrics, satire, comical squibs. The prose – critical, philosophical, political, religious – ranges from his early radical writings to the more conservative On the Constitution of the Church and State, his influential Shakespeare lectures, and the vast resource of the notebooks. Coleridge read widely throughout his life and engaged extensively with the work of, among many others, Milton, Fielding, Berkeley, Priestley, Kant, Schelling. One of his most important relationships was with William Wordsworth. Another was with Sara Hutchinson. Entries trace Coleridge’s changing reputation, from brilliant young activist to the ‘Sage of Highgate’ to the later apostle of the theories of the imagination and of Practical Criticism. Other topics covered include opium, plagiarism, the French Revolution, Pantisocracy, Unitarianism, and the Salutation and Cat tavern.