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Sanditon is Jane Austen’s last novel, unfinished when she died in 1817. A comedy, it continues the strain of burlesque and caricature she wrote as a teenager and in private throughout her life. In her ground-breaking essay, Todd contextualizes Austen’s life and work, Sanditon’s connection with Northanger Abbey (1819) and Emma (1816), Jane Austen’s insecurity of income and home, and the Austen family’s financial speculations. She examines the work’s discussion of the moral and social problems of...

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used...

This book argues that theology is central to an understanding of the literary ghost story. Victorian ghost stories have traditionally been read in the context of agnosticism - as stories which reveal a society struggling with Christian orthodoxy in a new 'Enlightened' world. This book, however, uses theological ideas from St Augustine through to modern theologians to identify a theological journey taken by the protagonists of such stories, and charts each stage of this journey through the short...

This book places children's literature at the forefront of early twentieth-century debates about national identity and class relations that were expressed through the pursuit of leisure. Focusing on stories about hiking, camping and sailing, this book offers a fresh insight into a popular period of modern British cultural and political history.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five v...

Poetry is an ancient verbal art, which has its roots in the oral epics and fragments that survive from classical times. Dictionaries of English, by contrast, are a comparatively recent phenomenon, beginning with the 'hard words' that Robert Cawdrey gathered in A Table Alphabeticall in 1604 and extending to the present edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its ongoing revisions. This innovative collection of essays is the first volume to explore the ways in which dictionaries have stim...

This set reissues 10 books on T. S. Eliot originally published between 1952 and 1991. The volumes examine many of Eliot's most respected works, including his Four Quartets and The Waste Land. As well as exploring Eliot's work, this collection also provides a comprehensive analysis of the man behind the poetry, particularly in Frederick Tomlin's T. S. Eliot: A Friendship. This set will be of particular interest to students of literature.

One way and another, nearly all of Shakespeare's countrymen and women (including the playwright himself) spent at least parts of their lives as servants of someone else. But until now that fact has gone largely unregarded. This book remedies the oversight, by showing how the ideals and practices of early modern service affect dozens of characters in almost all the plays, in ways that enrich our understanding of familiar figures like Iago and Falstaff and enhance the significance of lesser-known...

Humor in the Caribbean Literary Canon intimately examines Caribbean writers who engage canonical Western texts and forms, while using humor to challenge Western representations of people of African descent.

Queer Lyrics fills a gap in queer studies: the lyric, as poetic genre, has never been directly addressed by queer theory. Vincent uses formal concerns, difficulty and closure, to discuss innovations specific to queer American poets. He traces a genealogy based on these queer techniques from Whitman, through Crane and Moore, to Ashbery and Spicer. Queer Lyrics considers the place of form in queer theory, while opening new vistas on the poetry of these seminal figures.

One of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is among the greatest poets to have written in the English language. He was a multi-talented writer, fascinated by the occult, an important dramatist, critic and autobiographer, with a career extending over more than fifty years. Professor Jeffares investigates the relationship between Yeats's life and his work. He considers the crucial moments as well as the famous relationships that changed Yeats's d...

The Oxford Handbook of John Bunyan is the most extensive volume of original essays ever published on the seventeenth-century Nonconformist preacher and writer, John Bunyan. Its thirty-eight chapters examine Bunyan's life and works, their religious and historical contexts, and the critical reception of his writings, in particular his allegorical narrative, The Pilgrim's Progress. Interdisciplinary and comprehensive, it provides unparalleled scope and expertise, ranging from literary theory to rel...

Buddhadeva Bose (1908-1974) is known to readers of Bengali as perhaps the greatest and most versatile talent in the Bengali literary sphere succeeding Tagore. Poet, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, literary critic, and essayist of great distinction, he is one of the most important literary personalities of twentieth century Bengali literature. Few realize that Buddhadeva Bose was also one of the best writers of English prose in modern Indian writing in English. An Acre of Green Grass br...

Post-war European adaptations of Hamlet are defined by ambiguities and inconsistencies. Such features are at odds with the traditional model of adaptation, which focuses on expanding and explaining the source. Inspired by Derrida’s deconstruction, this book introduces a new interpretative paradigm. Central to this paradigm is the idea that an act of adaptation consists in foregrounding gaps and incoherencies in the source; it is about questioning rather than clarifying. The book explores this pa...

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. This volume offers an overview of contemporary Eastern African writing in English since the mid-twentieth century. It takes a fresh look at what has been an under-represented regional literary tradition within what continues to be an under-represented continental li...

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.

This book presents a long-ranging and in-depth study of South African writing set in London during the apartheid years and beyond. Since London served as an important site of South African exile and emigration, particularly during the second half of the twentieth-century, the city shaped the history of South African letters in meaningful and material ways. Being in London allowed South African writers to engage with their own expectations of Englishness, and to rethink their South African identi...

This Guide analyses the criticism of English-language literature from the major regions of the postcolonial world. Criticism on works by writers such as Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, is discussed to illustrate the themes and concepts essential to an understanding of postcolonial literature and the development of criticism in the field

The concept of transmesis refers to the depiction of translation and translators within fictional texts. The term's metaphorical conjunction of mimesis with translation suggests both the mimetic treatment of items in the black box, i.e. of those aspects of translation that translations as 'finished' products conceal, and also the question of how to represent language and multilingual realities in literature. Thomas O. Beebee examines and compares examples of transmesis across a wide variety of l...