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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 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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

Picture the young George Bernard Shaw spending long days in the Reading Room of the British Museum, pursuing a self-taught education, all the while longing for the green landscapes of his native Ireland. It is no coincidence that gardens and libraries often set the scene for Shaw's plays, yet scholars have seldom drawn attention to the fact until now. Exposing the subtle interplay of these two settings as a key pattern throughout Shaw's dramas, Shaw's Settings fills the need for a systematic st...

This book examines the literary impact of famed British poet, Barry MacSweeney, who worked at the forefront of poetic discovery in post-war Britain. Agitated equally by politics and the possibilities of artistic experimentation, Barry MacSweeney was ridiculed in the press, his literary reputation only recovering towards the end of his life which was cut short by alcoholism. With close readings of MacSweeney alongside his contemporaries, precursors, and influences, including J.H. Prynne, Shelley...

When we think about the process of European unification, our conversations inevitably ponder questions of economic cooperation and international politics. Salvatore Pappalardo offers a new and engaging perspective, arguing that the idea of European unity is also the product of a modern literary imagination. This book examines the idea of Europe in the modernist literature of primarily Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and James Joyce (but also of Theodor Daubler and Srecko Kosovel), all authors who had...

This book highlights the centrality of the autobiographical enterprise to Italian women's writing through the twentieth century-a century that has frequently been referred to as the century of the self. Ursula Fanning addresses the thorny issue of essentialism potentially involved in underlining links between women's writing and autobiographical modes, and ultimately rejects it in favor of an argument based on the cultural, linguistic, and literary marginalization of women writers within the Ita...

The reputation of Janet Frame, modern New Zealand writer, languishes. [Janet Frame] will bring more recognition to Frame. Among its well-known contributors are Patricia Moran, Suzette A. Henke and Claire Bazin. The collection truly has a global reach, with professors in the U.S., England, France, and Australia, and all of the essays are written by women. Given Frame's opposition to patriarchy and preoccupation with "Womanly" language and feminist themes, women bring a unique point of view to ana...

This is a new and comprehensive reconsideration of Graham Greene's use of Catholic and theological issues in his fictions and other writings from the 1920s until the 1980s. This major new reconsideration of Graham Greene's writings, from the 1920s until the 1980s, focuses both on his best known novels and his less familiar works, including his short stories, plays, poetry, film scripts and reviewing, journalism and personal correspondence. It explores the major issues of Catholic faith and doubt...

Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that “books are made out of books,” but he has been famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. The Wittliff Collection a...

In this book, Cioran writes of politics, of history, and of the utopian dream. "A small masterwork . . . a stringent examination of some persistent and murky notions in human history. . . . It is best to read Cioran while sitting. The impact upon the intellect can be temporarily stunning, and motor systems may give way under the assault".--Joseph Patrick Kennedy, "Houston Chronicle" "Cioran has a claim to be regarded as among the handful of original minds . . . writing today".-- "New York Times"...