Böcker i Oxford English Monographs-serien

When we think of writers today, we often think of them as thin and poor-as starving artists. This book traces the history of this idea, and asks why hunger has been such a compelling metaphor for thinking about writing in modern times.

This book shows how Ashbery's poetry has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange. Through detailed close readings of his poetry, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented.

Focusing on Second Generation New York School poetry from 1960 to the present day, this volume explores the poets who lived and wrote from or about New York, the forms of their poems, and the a relationship between the structures they inhabited and the structures they created.

Modernist Physics studies literary texts and scientific ideas in their historical context to provide an original account of the ways in which Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence engaged with the scientific theories, especially those of Albert Einstein.

The first extended examination of the influence of monasticism on Wordsworth's writing. Covering the poet's development between 1806 and 1822, it considers how a series of sources describing medieval monastic life in the north of England influenced Wordsworth's thinking about regional attachment, trans-historical community, and national cohesion.

Draws on the unpublished writings of Charles Olson and situates his work in the context of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and music to tell the story of how American poets and artists reimagined art and literature for the post-war world.

Kelsey Jackson Williams presents the first full account of the manuscript notebooks of the antiquary John Aubrey (1626-1697), which cover everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. He reshapes our understanding of Aubrey, and of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.

A detailed exploration of a significant work of Tudor literature, The Mirror for Magistrates. The volume shows how the text is more than a moralistic collection of poems and how it is concerned with the transmission of national history, and the ways in which the past can be distorted, misremembered, misinterpreted, or lost.

Duncan White draws on previously unpublished and neglected material to tell the story of Nabokov the professional writer; to explore how he balanced his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace; and to reconceptualise the way we think about one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century.

This volume examines how literature was central to the debates about royal succession and political culture of the early eighteenth century. It reshapes our understanding of writers such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison, as well as our understanding of political, literary, and material cultures of the time.

Stephen J. Ross examines the concept of nature in the work of John Ashbery. Through close readings of Ashbery's poetry and critical prose, he reveals Ashbery's work to be a case study of the dramatic transformation of nature in art and literature since World War II.

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley reappraises the lines of influence said to exist between Joyce's writing and early cinema, and provides an alternative to previous psychoanalytic readings of Joyce and film. By putting Joyce's literary work into dialogue with both early cinema and phenomenology, this book elucidates and enlivens literature, film, and philosophy.

How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? Conspicuous Silences examines the effect of this literary strategy on the reader's experience of a selection of Victorian novels.

Sophie Duncan illuminates iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and careers of the actresses who played them. Duncan draws on a wealth of archival material to explore the vital ways in which fin-de-siecle Shakespeare and Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other.

A study of how three modernist poets (Yeats, Jones, & Eliot) at the height of their careers drew on their religious beliefs to transform some of their greatest poems into maps of the relationship between history and eternity.

Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth.

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, identifying mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric and charting them against key intersections in the two men's lives.

Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism, exploring the tensions between formal experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of the politicised literature of the 1930s.

Focusing on the writing of John Thelwall, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, he Majesty of the People examines how theories about the role of the intellectual or the writer were developed as part of the 1790s' contestation of the concept of the majesty of the people.

The Poetics of Commemoration is a study of the role poetry played in the commemoration of kings during the Viking Age, investigating the variety of ways in which poets responded to the death of a king, and how poetry helped to constructed a shared memory and identity for the community he left behind.

Visionary Philology combines nuanced and incisive close reading of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill with detailed scholarship and fresh archival work, examining Hill's work in relation to the history of language and of the study of language.

Forms of Engagement sheds light on questions of poetic form in women's poetry. It traces the influences on the work of Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish, allowing readers to understand better both how women composed their poems and how they engaged with their contemporaries.

The Literary Underground in the 1660s sheds new light on a world of political opposition and sedition. It tells the story of three oppositional writers, Andrew Marvell, George Wither, and Ralph Wallis, and their contributions to the restoration literary underground.

This book is about ideas of sympathy in the early twentieth-century novel. It offers a new reading of literary modernism, challenging notions of modernism as hostile to emotion and empathy. It also offers a new intervention into the growing field of literature and emotion studies.

Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.

This book is a fascinating in-depth study of the British novelist, poet, and illustrator Stevie Smith (1902-1971). It draws on extensive archival material to offer new insights into her work, challenges conventional readings of her as an eccentric, and offers new perspectives on British twentieth-century poetry and its reception.

The Poet's Mind is a comprehensive study of the ways in which Victorian poets thought and wrote about the human mind. It argues that these poets used their writing both to express psychological processes of thought and feeling and to subject those processes to scrutiny and analysis.

By showing how Langland transformed Conscience as he composed the A, B and C texts of Piers Plowman, Sarah Wood offers a new approach to reading the serial versions of the poem. While the three versions have customarily been read in parallel-text formats, she demonstrates that Langland's revisions are newly comprehensible if read in sequence.

This book investigates how Syon Abbey responded to the religious turbulence of the 1520s and 1530s. It examines the books three brothers - William Bonde, John Fewterer, and Richard Whitford - produced and argues that the Bridgettines used vernacular printing to engage with religious and political developments that threatened their orthodox faith.

This is the first book-length study of John Skelton (1460-1529) for almost twenty years, and the first to link his poetic theory with his practice as a writer and translator. Reassessing Skelton's place in the English literary canon, it suggests the need to reconsider the conventional distinction between 'Medieval' and 'Renaissance' poetics.