Böcker i Oxford English Monographs-serien

John Lyly, Robert Greene, and Thomas Lodge created the pulp fiction of the later sixteenth century. Their pamphlets combined sensational plots, adventurous heroines, and self-conscious narrators. This book examines how they dealt with the constraints of mass market authorship, and replaces their narratives at the heart of Elizabethan literature.

During the 19th century, the study of language shared with geology certain metaphors to describe theories of change. This book looks at three authors whose handling of language and dialect speech demonstrates different angles of approach, and puts fiction into dialogue with science.

This is an innovative study of the use by the poet Shelley, conventionally regarded as an atheist, of ideas and imagery from the Scriptures in expressing his world view.

The funeral elegy is a quintessential English Renaissance genre. This book charts the history of the elegy from the mid-16th century up to the 1630's, examines a series of detailed studies of the works of major elegists, and shows it as a kind of laboratory in which writers could put theories of composition into practice.

Presenting the playwright, Dekker, as a bold, pugnacious writer who experimented with form in order to articulate his militant Protestant ideas, this critique is centred on "The Whore of Babylon". The plays are perceived as blending satire, hagiography and propaganda.

A study of the complex structure of the sonnets of Philip Sidney and writers influenced by him. The book argues that construction of such intricate mathematical patterns suggests the patterns themselves had significance, and offers cosmological explanations which challenge orthodox criticism.

K. P. Clarke explores how Chaucer's work was affected by the tradition of commentary on or glossing of vernacular poetry, and how this context affected the layout and therefore the reading of texts within specific manuscripts. He seeks to understand Chaucer's Italian sources, such as Dante and Boccaccio, as they were read by Chaucer himself.

This book not only provides a detailed analysis of Johnson's relationship with the ethics and theology of the 18th century, examining the background to his views on a wide range of issues debated by the philosophers and divines of his age but also challenges the assumption that Johnson's religious beliefs were unstable and filled with anxiety.

Scarlett Baron explores the works of two of the most admired and mythologized masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose: Gustave Flaubert (1822-1880) and James Joyce (1882-1941). She uncovers the lifelong fascination that Joyce harboured for Flaubert and investigates how this heightened interest inflected his own creative practice.

This study reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator. It discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception.

After a mid-career adoption of French as a language of composition, Beckett continued to write in his native English as well as French, and to translate his work, often unfaithfully, between the two. This study focuses on how Beckett's self-translation emerges as a crucial aspect of his exploration of uncertainty, exile, and the myth of identity.

This study considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry. It argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in the period highlights anxieties about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. It covers key poems by authors such as Tennyson and the Brownings, and contextualizes them with reference to lesser-known works.

What did Coleridge know about medicine and how did it influence the development of his critical thought? Aiming to answer this question, this book deals with Coleridge's career between 1795 and 1806. It supplies an account of his activities in 'philosophic medicine', showing how these paved the way for his conversion to German idealist philosophy.

In a 1925 speech, Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' Thomas Karshan draws on untranslated early writings and restricted archival material to argue that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that his novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved.

By demonstrating that many of the concepts and styles associated with Modernism were actually derived directly from cultures such as Japan, China, Korea, India, Egypt, Assyria, West Africa, and the Pacific Islands, this book provides an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West.

Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

Pain is not the same for everybody. Victorian novels were awash with suffering, but this book also explores late Victorian discussions of fire-walking, tattooing and flogging, and in doing this shows the ways in which the experience was affected by class, gender, race, and criminality.

Sieges were a popular subject in medieval romances. This book is a full-length study of this important theme in medieval literature. It shows how writers used descriptions of sieges to explore such subjects as military strategy, heroism, chivalry and attitudes to the past.

A study of the cultural and economic status of playwriting between 1660 and 1710. The author argues that this period saw the move towards modern attitudes of dramatic art - which require authors to be the sole begetters of their works - and explores developments in the theatrical marketplace.

Marianne Moore's poetry offers a rich site from which to analze a tradition of American orientalism which focused upon China. This text examines why she chose to participate in that tradition and analyzes why her borrowing of Chinese models was so critical to the formation of her verse.

This text examines Hazlitt's "metaphysics". Studying his development of the power principle as a counter to the pleasure principle of the Utilitarians, it examines his philosophy of discourse, his account of imaginative structure and of genius, and asserts the tenacity of this principle.

This text provides a reading of Walter Scott's "Waverley Novels" in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Gothic. Including analyses of such neglected works as "The Fortunes of Nigel", "Peveril of the Peak", and "Woodstock" it focuses on questions of narrative authority and historical authenticity.

This book explores the development of artists' biographies in the cultural context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting.

Previous histories of the Abbey Theatre have repeated W.B. Yeats's assertion that there was no censorship of the theatre in Ireland. This book utilizes new source material to prove that censorship did occur and that Yeats was willing to sacrifice artistic freedom when he saw the chance to ensure the longevity of the Abbey Theatre and his legacy.

This book brings new perspectives to the study of sensation fiction in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines alongside their fiction to explore the self-conscious and complex ways they used sensation to re-work contemporary notions of female agency.

An interdisciplinary reassessment of Milton's poetry in light of the literary and conceptual problem posed by the poet's attempt to put into words that which is unsayable and beyond representation. Situates Milton's emerging poetics of ineffability in the context of the intellectual cross-currents of Renaissance humanism and Protestant theology.

This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Beckett - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.

This book analyses the relationship between Conrad's work and three major subjects: the philosophy of history, nationalism (in Europe and Latin America), and Conrad's interest in French Romanticism and Napoleon Bonaparte. As well as discussing more well-known works, Niland re-evaluates the long-neglected late novels The Rover and Suspense.

Frank Shovlin presents a unique examination of Irish literature through the middle decades of the twentieth century by considering the role of literary magazines in the development of a range of writers from AE (George William Russell), to John Hewitt. He draws on a wealth of new material and argues for the importance of these in keeping Irish cultural life vibrant in these neglected years.

In a sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis (1390-3), Elliot Kendall shows how deeply the great household shaped the way Gower and his contemporaries (including Chaucer, Clanvowe, chroniclers, and parliamentary petitioners) imagined their world.