Writers and Their Work – serie

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.

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.

This new study of Andrew Marvell offers a state-of-the-art guide to one of the most intriguing and elusive poets of the seventeenth century. Hero to the eighteenth century for his published defences of parliamentary government and religious toleration, Marvell was friend and defender of Milton, underground author of satires against the Restoration court, paradoxically, promoted by T.S. Eliot for a diametrically opposite set of qualities and achievements – poise, detachment, an ethos both world-excluding and hypercivilised, not to mention the most perfect poems we have on “the figure in the landscape”. Annabel Patterson, known for her ability to make serious scholarship engaging, explains how Marvell’s complex personality and beliefs produce these contradictory responses. The book provides comprehensive introductions to Marvell’s different self-representations, and places the most famous poems, such as The Garden and Horatian Ode, in the dialectic they lose when read only in anthologies.

Walter Pater (1839-94) was an active participant in the literary marketplace as an academic, journalist, critic, writer of short stories, and novelist at a time of the rise of English and of journalism, university reform, and the professionalisation and separating out of literature from journalism. He was also a classicist whose interest in Greek studies coincided with a commitment to explore in his writings the scope of male homosexual discourse. This critical study of a key figure in Victorian literary society examines Pater’s work on art history, literature and Greek studies, as well as analysing the roles of gender and journalism in shaping his writing. Laurel Brake approaches Pater’s writings from the prospective of cultural history – including publishing and the politics of literature and gender – and covers his key works, including Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Style, Imaginary Portraits, Marius the Epicurean, and Greek Studies.

This original study of Elizabeth Gaskell places the woman and her writings within their full Victorian context. Recent critical appraisal has focused both on her role as a novelist of industrial England, and on her awareness of the position of women and the problems of the woman writer in that society. Kate Flint’s perceptive book shows that for Elizabeth Gaskell the condition of women was inseparable from the broader issues of social change. Books such as Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters continually analyse and interrogate questions of power, authority and the expression and transmission of human values, and challenge many widely-held pre-conceptions of the age. Dr Flint shows how recent feminist criticism and theories of narrative work together to illuminate the radical and experimental nature of Mrs Gaskell’s fiction.

The four volumes of John Clare’s poetry that were published during his tragic life were so brutally edited, and sometimes even wilfully censored for political reasons that his work invited mainly curiosity and condescension from the literary world. Now that readers have a chance to re-evaluate Clare’s poetry, the “peasant poet”, “illiterate”, “quaint” and “rustic” is emerging as a radical thinker and writer. John Lucas’s unique volume reveals a knowing and articulate poet writing as an essentially oral artist – out of a subtle tradition of song as much as of poetry. Lucas champions Clare’s art in a vital and fascinating book which tells of the collision between the cultural orthodoxy of print and the poet whose work was demeaned and damaged by the forces of the literary establishment.

Dr Davies’ stimulating study covers the full range of Donne’s poetry, from the early satires and elegies to the Songs and Sonnets and Divine Poems, and includes thoughtful analysis of parts of his memorable sermons. Questioning the traditional critical approach which relates the writer’s life and work, she emphasises instead the Renaissance scepticism which brought all belief – including the concept of the “self” – into doubt. Close, sensitive readings of individual poems, which make room for personal reactions to their profound emotion, are balanced by a wider exploration of the cultural, religious and political context conditioning the poet’s mind. Raising a feminist challenge to the “virility” of his writing, Davies exposes the poet’s misogyny and the emotional conflict and vulnerability which it reveals. This powerful book will offer new directions for the study of Donne’s turbulent and brilliant intelligence.

Tolstoy’s art as represented in his greatest novels: War and Peace and Anna Karenina continues to absorb, fascinate and delight modern readers despite the lack of appeal of much of his later convictions. His great works continue to exercise a profound influence on the best imaginative writing. In our own time Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, clearly inspired by War and Peace, has deservedly become a world best seller. John Bayley concentrates in this short introductory study on Tolstoy’s two great works and the ancillary texts and tales that relate to them. In elucidating the power and originality which are alive in those masterpieces Professor Bayley makes a compelling case for a return to the originals which will continue to captivate readers and draw them irresistibly into a uniquely spacious and complex world.

William Hazlitt was a brilliant and perceptive essayist and critic in the early 19th Century whose critical impressions of his contemporaries and their work gave a sense of an age and the leading figures who populated it in a particularly vivid way.

T.S. Eliot considered George Herbert one of the liveliest and most profound of English poets with whose work he felt an instinctive accord. Describing The Temple as … ‘not simply a collection of poems but … a record of the spiritual struggles of a man of intellectual power and emotional intensity who gave much toil to perfecting his verses …’ T.S. Eliot considered Herbert’s religious verse above John Donne’s and placed him firmly in the ranks of the great English poets. Peter Porter’s new introduction gives a fresh perspective on the poetry of Herbert and on Eliot’s study itself.

Since the publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft has been justly hailed as a pioneer of feminist thought in the English-speaking world. Yet Wollstonecraft is a much more fascinating figure, her life far richer, and the impact of that life on her ideas a great deal stronger, than an account of one work alone can convey. This study provides an absorbing introduction to the range and diversity of Wollstonecraft’s writing. What is revealed is a writer who challenged the prejudices of her day, both in her work and in her life. Drawing on recent feminist and literary scholarship, Jane Moore plots the tensions in Wollstonecraft’s argument for female independence, mapping her ambivalence about sexual matters onto her quest for love. The debates that Mary Wollstonecraft aroused have lost none of their power to excite controversy in our time.

Tolkien was a specialist in a recherché field. He did not, at least initially, write for a mass audience. Yet for many in the 60s his books, particularly Lord of the Rings, became a political badge and an interpretative text. Widely translated, his fiction won the accolade both of parody and of its own learned journal; rock bands took names from his characters; and “Tolkien” – or how he was read – demonstrably affected modern fantasy, in writing, film, video- and board-game. This book explores how his work came to be so diversely received. Dr Moseley’s critical discussion examines Tolkien’s view of fiction as “sub-creation”, exploring his analysis of mythopoeia and of the status of art and literature in relation to his own practice. It is argued that in the critical concerns of Tolkien and his circle lie the key to important issues in his fiction. His use of linguistic game and literary pastiche is explored without obscuring his emotional commitment to the making of myths that expressed some of his deepest fears of the world he experienced.

Edmund Spenser (1554-1599) was the greatest Elizabethan poet, whose Shepheardes Calendar (1579) inaugurated a revolution in English poetry, and whose unfinished Faerie Queene (1590-96) was the longest and most accomplished poem written in the sixteenth century. Readers have always been immediately attracted by the fluid grace of is language, and by the magical world of dwarfs, hermits, knights and dragons evoked in The Faerie Queene, but have often been bewildered and overawed by the bulk and complexity of his writing. In this approachable and informative book, Colin Burrow clarifies the genres and conventions of work in Spenser’s poem. He explores the poet’s taste for archaism and allegory, and the native of epic and of heroism in The Faerie Queene. He presents Spenser as a ‘Renaissance’ poet, who is drawn at once to images of vital rebirth and to images of mortal frailty. In clear, jargon-free prose he explores Spenser’s equivocal relationship with his Queen and with the Irish landscape in which he spent his mature years. Spenser emerges from this book a less orthodox and harmonious poet that he is often thought to be, but as a complex, thoughtful and attractive writer.

Graham Greene is among the major creative talents of our time. This study concentrates on his achievements as a novelist whose work spanned more than sixty years, and was translated into forty languages. As skilful in writing with humour as with seriousness, he combined the gifts of a superb story-teller with the power to analyse the political ills and human dilemmas of an age of anxiety. As a writer who ‘happened to be a Catholic’, he also reflected the problem of faith and belief in a time of persistent violence. This study describes his vision of the twentieth century, and his evolving dedication to his craft as a writer of fiction.

After Shakespeare the most famous British author in Europe, in Britain Byron was for years either neglected, or a victim of the myth of his own personality. Now he is read and studied both for his complex politics and as a forerunner of many of the ideas and techniques more usually associated with post-modernism. Bone tackles the critical problems both of the populism of much of Byron’s early work, and conversely of the sophisticated comedy of Beppo, Don Juan and The Vision of Judgement. He argues that for all its contradictoriness Byron’s poetic mind develops organically, and that the scintillating technique of the late works grow out of the profoundly modern world-view, relativistic and secular, which had developed through his early years. Byron’s writing are seen as a vital area for post-ideological and new found criticism.

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.

Charlotte Yonge, a best-seller admired by her greatest literary contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century, but ignored or vilified by critics for the next hundred years, has recently received some attention from biographers, from historians of the Oxford Movement and of children’s literature, and from feminist critics; but her literary art, as novelist, historian and critic, has not enjoyed much recognition. Alethea Hayter’s book appraises her as a writer, not simply as a symptom of her times, surveying her non-fictional studies in history, onomastics and wild-life as well as her family chronicles, historical novels and children’s books.

A.S. Byatt (1936) has become known world-wide for her award-winning novel Possession (1990). This thrilling story of romance and literary detection, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has prompted a widespread reappraisal of Byatt’s entire oeuvre throughout Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, where she is often read in translation. Richard Todd’s assessment of Byatt’s literary identity treats the entire range of her writing from her earliest novels and essays to the present. Topics covered include Byatt’s conviction that all her writing forms part of one activity along with her astonishing range of reading; her fictional treatment of families and biographers; her belief that her characters must be portrayed as thinking being profoundly affected by joy and loss; her interest in writing about painting; and her articulately-held belief on matters such as religion and philosophy, metaphor and fairy tale.

Franz Kafka's work has profoundly influenced postmodernist thinking. Michael Wood pays close attention to individual works by Kafka and to his original Austro-Hungarian context.

Salman Rushdie is one of the most widely discussed of contemporary writers; also, one whose work has provoked disagreement and controversy—not least in the far-reaching 'Rushdie affair.' This study seeks to provide a balanced view by approaching Rushdie's fiction in terms of its dual responsibility to the 'found' world of historical circumstance and the 'made' world of the imagination. The novels are seen as characteristic texts for our times, negotiating between different (often conflicting) cultures, dissonant discourses, heterogeneous literary conventions, incommensurable conceptions of truth. The new edition considers the shifts in perspective observable in Rushdie's more recent fiction, adjustments to this creative negotiation which reflect changes in the author's understanding of the world in the new millennium.

Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940’s – his first stories were greeted by Sean O’Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England – V S Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English Character, and recovering “broadness” without losing humanity. He has many faces as a writer. If he inherits the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the ‘self’. Wilson’s major books often concern ‘creative breakdown’: they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

This book re-assesses the significance to Pre-Raphaelitism of the fundamental relationship of poem to painting, of the visual to the verbal, to examine those aspects of the movement that account for its enduring legacy. Beginning with the profound and somewhat neglected influence of Ruskin’s work upon the poets and painters, Smith focuses in particular upon the Pre-Raphaelite rehabilitation of the sister arts analogy, and an aesthetic of ekphrasis as played out in the short-lived periodical The Germ and in D.G. Rossetti’s sonnets for pictures. At the heart of the project is a new reading of the notorious circumstances of Rossetti’s ‘coffined book’ - those manuscript poems Rossetti disinterred from his wife Elizabeth Siddal’s grave – that brings to the fore the all-pervasive significance to the Pre-Raphaelites of a complex aesthetic of resurrection. With this and other examples, Smith redefines for us those categories of the corporeal and spiritual, the material and immaterial, the verbal and visual that the Pre-Raphaelites aspired to re-conceptualise.

This study argues that Romeo and Juliet, perhaps Shakespeare’s most popularly-known play, repays thorough investigation – read afresh, the play is an extraordinary exploration of domestic conflict, social relations and linguistic practice. Drawing upon recent criticism on history and literature, and the rarely-discussed work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women critics, Sasha Roberts presents new readings of Romeo and Juliet and its early modern cultural context. Concisely-argued chapters address a wide range of themes – including rival texts, body politics, ethnic identity, adolescence, sexuality, masculinity, relations between women, family dynamics, ritual behaviour, language, bawdy, and the commodification of romantic love – and examine the play’s striking imagery of disease, blood, beds, and wombs. Clearly written, this lively and accessible study of Romeo and Juliet will be of interest to readers both new to and familiar with the play.

Providing a brief account of the life of Sir Walter Scott, this text charts his development as a poet and novelist, and justifies his claims to attention as a major 19th century novelist and a seminal influence on later writers.

This book is both a general introduction to and a particular interpretation of Shelley’s thought and major writings. As an introduction, it stresses his seriousness and sophistication, his poetic brilliance and intellectual courage. More specifically, its readings emphasise the materialistic and corporeal orientation of his work in opposition to a traditional view of him as a Romantic solipsist, a characterisation some of his own statements seem to invite. Fundamentally Shelley is understood here as a vanguard, revolutionary figure who writes for a better democratic future, but one which, paradoxically, he fears may threaten the cultural privilege it took to imagine it. But this pessimism is always the other side of an openness to new associations which continually reform both private and political life, relationship and citizenship.

Brian Friel is Ireland’s leading living playwright, a fact that is easily observable on the billboards of Derry, Dublin, London and New York. These locations are also essential in understanding the range and reach of Friel’s theatrical concerns and his projected audience. From his first major success on stage, Philadelphia Here I Come! in 1964 to the triumph of Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990, Friel has revived and revised the Irish tradition of verbal theatre. This book offers a critical examination of Friel’s dramatic writing both within the context of Irish storytelling and considering his crucial position as a writer from the north of Ireland negotiating between the responsibilities of art and the demands of violent conflict. Friel’s work forms the cornerstone of contemporary Irish drama and this comprehensive study shows why he is recognised as one of the most significant and influential playwrights writing today.

Everyone knows how funny Evelyn Waugh is. One of his finest comic creations was his own increasingly rebarbative public persona – a self-confessed ‘front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass’. No wonder new biographies of Waugh are popular. The life and work cannot be separated. Gathered productively at the writer’s desk are the chaotic and often bizarre details of Waugh’s own life, what he called the ‘adroit jigsaw’ of his unobtrusively elegant aesthetic structures, and his moral coherence. This study shows how Waugh transformed his own experiences into painfully comic, brilliantly constructed novels. They are works, in his own words, of ‘elegance and variety of contrivance’. Ann Pasternak Slater has written an ingenious and engaging study of the relationship between Waugh’s life and work, between his sharp moral vision and Dionysiac comic genius. She focuses on Waugh’s entire fictional oeuvre in a book notable for its intelligent sympathy.

Professor Hammond's succinct yet wide-ranging account of the 'Golden Age' of satire, 1660-1750, critically explores its dominant literary forms and examines the work of its outstanding practitioners.