Our Bookshelf

Rehana Ahmed

Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism
Manchester University Press
2015

This book examines contemporary literary representations of Muslims by British writers of South Asian Muslim descent - including Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali and Nadeem Aslam - to explore the contribution they make to urgent questions about multicultural politics and the place of Muslims within Britain.

Warren Boutcher

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe: Volume One
Oxford University Press
2016

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume one focuses on contexts from within Montaigne's own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius.

Warren Boutcher

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe: Volume Two
Oxford University Press
2016

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne's Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern western university. Volume two focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript.

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

William Godwin, St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century
Pickering & Chatto
1992

In "St Leon" the emphasis is on the individual's powerlessness in the face of momentous historical change. Set during the Protestant Reformation, the novel tells the harrowing tale of an exiled French aristocrat who is given the secrets of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life.

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
Penguin
1996

A Simple Story by the actress, playwright and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald has remained enduringly popular and almost continuously in print since its first publication in 1791.

Pamela Clemit

The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley
The Clarendon Press
2001

The Godwinian Novel is a pioneering analysis of the school of fiction inaugurated by William Godwin, and developed in the works of his principal followers, Charles Brockden Brown and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (eds)

William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Broadview
2001

Written during the weeks following Wollstonecraft's early death, Memoirs provides an interpretation of the relations between Wollstonecraft's writings and her personal history, a candid account of her various relationships, and a vindication of her egalitarian intimacy with Godwin.

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

William Godwin, Caleb Williams
Oxford University Press
2009

Caleb Williams is a psychological thriller and suspenseful tale of detection and pursuit.

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

The Letters of William Godwin: Volume 1: 1778-1797
Oxford University Press
2011

Publishes for the first time all the letters of this significant social thinker, novelist, and philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s
Cambridge University Press
2011

This Cambridge Companion highlights the energy, variety and inventiveness of the literature written in response to events in France and the political reaction at home.

Pamela Clemit (ed.)

The Letters of William Godwin: Volume II: 1798-1805
Oxford University Press
2014

Publishes for the first time all the letters of this significant social thinker, novelist, and philosopher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

Sam McBean

Feminism's Queer Temporalities
Routledge
2015

Despite feminism’s uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism’s timing.

Claire Preston

The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century England
Oxford University Press
2016

The Poetics of Scientific Investigation in Seventeenth-Century English Literature considers the literary textures of science writing - its rhetorical figures, neologisms, its uses of parody, romance, and various kinds of verse.

Tessa Whitehouse

The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720-1800
Oxford University Press
2015

Religious dissenters and their literary and social heritage are the principal subjects of this book. At its heart is a group of English men whose activities were local, transcontinental and circum-Atlantic. Drawing on letters, lecture notes, manuscript accounts of academies, and a range of printed texts and paratexts The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720-1800 explores the connections between dissent, education, and publishing in the eighteenth century.

Jerry Brotton

Great Maps: The World's Masterpieces Explored and Explained
Dorling Kindersley
2014

In Great Maps, author and historian Jerry Brotton tells the hidden story behind more than 60 of the most significant maps from around the world, picking out key features, stories, and techniques in rich visual detail to reveal the inner meaning buried within the landscape.

Barbara Taylor

The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in our Times
Penguin
2014

The Last Asylum is Barbara Taylor's journey through mental illness and the psychiatric health care system.

Paul Hamilton

Realpoetik: European Romanticism and Literary Politics
Oxford University Press
2013

Realpoetik compares the writings of key German, French, and Italian Romantics, with an eye to their differences from British Romanticism.

Ruth Ahnert

The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century
Cambridge University Press
2013

Examining works by some of the most famous prisoners from the early modern period including Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey and Thomas Wyatt, Ruth Ahnert presents the first major study of prison literature dating from this era. She argues that the English Reformation established the prison as an influential literary sphere.

Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards (eds)

A Companion to Fifteenth-Century English Poetry
D.S. Brewer
2013

This collection of seventeen original essays by leading authorities offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the significant authors and important aspects of fifteenth-century English poetry.

Nadia Valman, Jonathan M. Hess, and Maurice Samuels (eds)

Nineteenth Century Jewish Literature: A Reader
Princeton University Press
2013

Offering unique insights into the hopes and fears of Jews experiencing the dramatic impact of modernity, the literature collected in this book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and culture, whether general readers, students, or scholars.

Mark Currie

The Invention of Deconstruction
Palgrave MacMillan
2013

This book offers an account of the invention and reinvention of deconstruction in literary studies and the humanities more generally. Focusing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, it argues that the early impact of deconstruction was connected to its perceived assault upon truth.

Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista (eds)

Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate
Manchester University Press
2013

This collection of eleven new essays by leading international scholars offers a thorough revaluation of Algernon Charles Swinburne, a fascinating and complex figure. The essays in this collection reassess Swinburne’s work and reconstruct his vital and often provocative contribution to the Victorian cultural debate.

David James and Jeannette Baxter (eds)

Andrea Levy: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Continuum T & T Clark
2014

This critical guide surveys a wide range of current critical perspectives on Levy's work. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars the book explores issues of literary form, diasporic literature and cultural value, as well as the BBC TV adaptation of Small Island.

John Barrell

Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763-1813: 'A Native Artist'
University of Wales Press
2013

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country.

Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby (eds)

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity
Bloomsbury Academic
2013

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity is the first book to explore the persistent theme of the city in Chesterton's writing. Situating him in relation to both Victorian and Modernist literary paradigms, the book explores a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to address the way his imaginative investments and political interventions conceive urban modernity and the central figure of London.

Shahidha Bari

Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations
Routledge
2012

Exploring Keats’s own Romantic accounts of feeling and thinking, this study draws a connection between poetry and the phenomenological branches of modern philosophy. The study takes Keats’s poetic evocation of touching hands, wandering feet, beating hearts and breathing bodies as a descriptive elaboration of consciousness and a phenomenological account of experience.

John Barrell

Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793-96
Oxford University Press
2000

How easy was it to distinguish between fantasising about the death of George III and 'imagining' it, in the legal sense of 'intending' or 'designing'? John Barrell examines this question in the context of the political trials of the mid-1790s and the controversies they generated.

John Barrell

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s
Oxford University Press
2006

In this brilliant, engagingly written, and profusely illustrated book, John Barrell, well-known for his studies of the history, literature, and art of the period, argues that the conflict between the ancien regime in Britain and the emerging democratic movement was so fundamental that it could not be contained within what had previously been thought of as the 'normal' arena of politics.

Michèle Barrett

The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault
Polity Press
1992

The concept of ideology - traditionally one of Marxism's most persuasive ideas - has recently been subjected to devastating criticism. Michèle Barrett shows that Marx's own writings offer a confusing array of possible approaches to 'ideology', which the classical Marxist tradition consolidated as 'mystification that serves class interests'.

Michèle Barrett

Casualty Figures: How Five Men Survived the First World War
Verso
2007

In this powerful new book, Michèle Barrett uncovers the lives of five ordinary soldiers who endured the “war to end all wars,” and how they dealt with its horrors, both at the front and after the war’s end.

Michèle Barrett (ed.)

Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
Penguin
1993

In A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence.

Michèle Barrett

Imagination in Theory: Essays on Writing and Culture
Polity Press
1999

Imagination in Theory contains both new and published work focusing on Barrett's long-standing interest in cultural questions, and shows how this informs her analysis of current developments in social and feminist theory.

Michèle Barrett

Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing
Harcourt Brace
1979

This collection of essays and other writings does justice to Virginia Woolf's reputation as a major essayist and critic, it offers appraisals of Aphra Behn, Charlotte Bronte and Katherine Mansfield amongst others.

Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds)

Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates
Stanford University Press
1992

Offering unique insights into the hopes and fears of Jews experiencing the dramatic impact of modernity, the literature collected in this book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in modern Jewish history and culture, whether general readers, students, or scholars.

Michèle Barrett and Duncan Barrett

Star Trek: The Human Frontier
Polity Press
2000

Witten for both the true Trekker and the complete novice, Star Trek: The Human Frontier is that rare work of cultural studies, informed by the knowledge of literature, social thought, and popular culture.

Julia Boffey (ed.)

Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology
Oxford University Press
2003

This anthology provides new editions of five fifteenth-century English poems framed as dreams, and demonstrates the energy with which this influential medieval form was explored by post-Chaucerian writers.

Julia Boffey and Virginia Davis (eds)

Recording Medieval Lives
Shaun Tyas
2009

This volume publishes the proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, which explored the variety of forms in which medieval lives were recorded, and some of the many considerations which determined how such records were prompted or shaped.

Julia Boffey

Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475-1530
British Library
2012

This study explores the continuing relationship between manuscript and printed material in London after Caxton’s establishment of a printing business at Westminster in 1476, and the different ways in which people adapted to the availability of new technology.

Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards

A New Index of Middle English Verse
British Library
2005

This book was originally published in 1943. It has been replaced by this new index, offering a first-line listing of all surviving verse recorded between c.1150 and 1500.

Julia Boffey, J. B. Trapp and Douglas Gray (eds))

Medieval English Literature, 2nd edn
Oxford University Press
2002

This succinct and authoritative anthology of medieval English literature is the first volume of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, Second Edition. Emphasizing texts that give students first-hand access to significant aspects of the Middle Ages, this collection reveals the vast riches of medieval literature in English, from Anglo-Saxon times to the fifteenth century.

Julia Boffey and Pamela King (eds)

London and Europe in the Later Middle Ages
Brepols
1995

This publication covers many aspects of London's history and culture from the twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries.

Andrea Brady

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning
Palgrave MacMillan
2006

This book situates elegy's conventions with the rituals of rhetoric and mourning. Drawing on anthropology to analyze transitional rites, charisma, and the performance of grief, it offers new readings of famous poems, as well as little-known texts published in manuscript and popular print.

Andrea Brady

Mutability
Seagull
2012

A chronicle of motherhood and infancy, Brady’s Mutability marks the excesses of attention and love in this unique relationship, the gradual unfurling of one person into two.

Andrea Brady

Wildfire
Krupskaya
2010

Wildfire is a verse essay. It is trying to persuade us, to recognize that certain catastrophes and felicities are not inevitable.

Andrea Brady and Emily Butterworth (eds)

The Uses of the Future in Early Modern Europe
Routledge
2009

Examining poetry, architecture, colonial exploration, technology, drama, satire, wills, childbirth and deathbed rituals, humanism, religious radicalism and republicanism, this collection provides new readings of canonical early modern texts and insights into popular culture.

Jerry Brotton

The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction
Oxford University Press
2006

This wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance sees the period as a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement and cultural experimentation and interaction on a global scale, alongside a darker side of religion, intolerance, slavery, and massive inequality of wealth and status.

Jerry Brotton

The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo
Oxford University Press
2002

This is a timely and controvesial book that explodes the myth of the European Renaissance as a founding moment of cultural superiority: it was a time when East and West encountered each other as equals.

Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine

Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West
Cornell University Press
2003

In this groundbreaking, highly provocative examination of the Renaissance, Jerry Brotton and Lisa Jardine raise questions about the formation of cultural identity in Western Europe. Through an analysis of the circulation of art and luxury objects, the authors challenge the view that Renaissance culture defined itself in large part against an exotic, dangerous, always marginal East.

Jerry Brotton

The Sale of the Late King's Goods: Charles I and his Art Collection
Macmillan
2006

Set against the backdrop of war, revolution, and regicide, and moving from London to Venice, Mantua, Madrid, Paris and the Low Countries, Jerry Brotton’s colourful and critically acclaimed book explores the formation and dispersal of King Charles I’s art collection.

Jerry Brotton

A History of the World in Twelve Maps
Allen Lane
2012

In this scintillating book, Jerry Brotton examines the significance of 12 maps - from the mystical representations of ancient history to the satellite-derived imagery of today. He vividly recreates the environments and circumstances in which each of the maps was made, showing how each conveys a highly individual view of the world.

David Colclough

Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England
Cambridge University Press
2005

This book discusses a central chapter in the history of free speech in the Western world. The nature and limits of freedom of speech prompted sophisticated debate in a wide range of areas in the early seventeenth century; it was one of the 'liberties of the subject' fought for by individuals and groups across the political landscape. David Colclough argues that freedom of speech was considered to be a significant civic virtue during this period.

David Colclough (ed.)

John Donne's Professional Lives
D. S. Brewer
2003

A tightly focussed series of essays by scholars of international reputation and younger experts in the field, John Donne's Professional Lives contains new discoveries and fresh interpretations. It offers a revisionist interpretation of Donne's career and makes a polemical case for studying the full range of his writings.

Mark Currie

The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise
Edinburgh University Press
2012

This new study asks how stories affect the way we think about time and, in particular, how they condition thinking about the future. Focusing on surprise and the unforeseeable, the book argues that stories are mechanisms that reconcile what is taking place with what will have been.

Mark Currie

Postmodern Narrative Thoery
Palgrave MacMillan
2011

In this revised, updated and expanded new edition of an established text, Mark Currie explores a range of central questions and guides students through the complex theories that have shaped the study of narrative in recent decades.

Mark Currie

About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time
Edinburgh University Press
2007

About Time brings together ideas about time from narrative theory and philosophy. It argues that literary criticism and narratology have approached narrative primarily as a form of retrospect, and demonstrates through a series of arguments and readings that anticipation and other forms of projection into the future offer new analytical perspectives to narrative criticism and theory.

Markman Ellis, Brycchan Carey, and Sarah Salih (eds)

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Writing in Britain and its Colonies 1660-1832
Palgrave
2004

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition brings together for the first time the most important strands of current thinking on the relationship between slavery and categories of writing, oratory, and visual culture in the 'long' eighteenth century.

Markman Ellis

The Coffee House: A Cultural History
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
2004

For a hundred years the coffee-house occupied the centre of urban life. Merchants held auctions of goods, writers and poets conducted discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments and gave lectures, philanthropists deliberated reforms. Coffee-houses thus played a key role in the explosion of political, financial, scientific and literary change in the 18th century.

Markman Ellis

The History of Gothic Fiction
Edinburgh University Press
2000

The History of Gothic Fiction debates the rise of the genre from its origins in the late eighteenth-century novel through nineteenth-century fictions of tyrants, monsters, conspirators and vampires to the twentieth-century zombie film.

Markman Ellis

The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel
Cambridge University Press
1996

By investigating the significance of political material in the fictional text, and by exploring the ways in which the novels themselves take part in historical disputes, Ellis shows that the sentimental novel was a political tool of considerable cultural significance.

Markman Ellis and Ann Lewis (eds)

Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture
Pickering and Chatto
2011

This collection of essays focuses on the variety of ways in which those involved in the sex trade were represented in the literary and popular culture of the eighteenth-century, across different art forms and highlighting contradictory interpretations.

Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (eds)

End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945
Manchester University Press
2011

This first book-length study explores the history of postwar England during the end of empire through a reading of novels which appeared at the time, moving from George Orwell and William Golding to Penelope Lively, Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan.

Rachael Gilmour

Grammars of Colonialism: Representing Languages in Colonial South Africa
Palgrave
2006

The study of languages was crucial to the development and maintenance of colonial power in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century South Africa. Grammars of Colonialism provides an overview of colonial linguistics in the region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, before proceeding to a detailed study of representations of the Bantu languages Xhosa and Zulu from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1870s.

Sam Halliday

Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
Palgrave
2007

This book reveals the full extent of electricity's significance in Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century literature and culture.

Sam Halliday

Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts
Edinburgh University Press
2013

Drawing on a wealth of texts and thinkers, the book shows the distinctive nature of sonic cultures in modernity. Arguing that these cultures are not reducible to sound alone, the book further shows that these encompass representations of sound in 'other' media: especially literature; but also, cinema and painting.

Paul Hamilton

Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory
Chicago University Press
2003

This bracing study redefines romanticism in terms of its philosophical habits of self-consciousness. According to Paul Hamilton, metaromanticism, or the ways in which writers of the romantic period generalized their own practices, was fundamentally characteristic of the romantic project itself.

Paul Hamilton

Coleridge and German Philosophy: The Poet in the Land of Logic
Continuum
2007

Samuel Taylor Coleridge frequently bridged the gap between British and European Romantic thought. This study sets Coleridge's mode of thinking within a German Romantic philosophical context as the place where his ideas can naturally extend themselves, stretch and find speculations of comparable ambition.

Paul Hamilton

Historicism: The New Critical Idiom
Routledge
2003

Historicism is the essential introduction to this crucial concept in literary studies.

Alfred Hiatt

Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600
British Library/University of Chicago Press
2008

In Terra Incognita, Alfred Hiatt draws on sources both literary and visual to understand the appeal of the antipodes. Examining maps and diagrams, as well as evidence contained in geographical and historical works, poetry, travel narratives, and legal documents, he challenges long-standing characterizations of medieval spatiality as exclusively symbolic and religious.

Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee (eds)

South Asian Resistances in Britain, 1858–1947 
Continuum
2011

This volume offers an alternative way of conceiving the history of Britain by excavating and exploring the numerous ways in which South Asians in Britain engaged in radical discourse and political activism from 1858 to 1947, before their more permanent migration and settlement.

Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin (eds)

Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing
Routledge
2012

Experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures address the nature of Muslim identity: its response to political realignments since the 1980s, its tensions between religious and secular models of citizenship, and its manifestation of these tensions as conflict between generations.

Ruvani Ranasinha (lead editor), Rehana Ahmed, Sumita Mukherjee, and Florian Stadtler (eds)

South Asians and the Shaping of Britain, 1870–1950: A Sourcebook 
Manchester University Press
2013

This invaluable sourcebook intervenes in contemporary debates about Britain’s heritage by illuminating the remarkable, yet still overlooked, impact that South Asians had on shaping the nature of British culture, politics and national identity during the period 1870−1950.

Rehana Ahmed

Walking a Tightrope: New Writing from Asian Britain
Macmillan Children's Books
2004

This title is a collection of short stories by some of Britain's top Asian writers - many of them writing for teenagers for the first time.

Alfred Hiatt

The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England
British Library/University of Toronto Press
2004

In The Making of Medieval Forgeries, Alfred Hiatt focuses on forgery in fifteenth-century England and provides a survey of the practice from the Norman Conquest through to the early sixteenth century, considering the function and context in which the forgeries took place.

Suzanne Hobson

Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics, 1910-1960
Palgrave
2011

Angels of Modernism explores the many and various ways that angels are represented in modernist literary cultures. This book argues that it is precisely the angel's lack of fit with self-consciously modern attitudes to art and belief that explains its continued attraction to modernist writers as well as its capacity to generate new meanings.

Suzanne Hobson and Rachel Potter (eds)

The Salt Companion to Mina Loy
Salt
2010

The Companion will be an invaluable new resource for students and readers of modernism. It provides new perspectives and cutting-edge research on Loy’s work and is distinctive in its consideration of her prosodic and linguistic experiments alongside a discussion of the literary and historical contexts in which she worked.

Peter Howarth

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism
Cambridge University Press
2005

This is the first critical account of how non-Modernist poetry responded to the Modernist revolution. Peter Howarth uncovers the origins of the battles over poetic style still being fought today, and connects the early twentieth-century controversy about poetic form with contemporary social and political developments and the trauma of the First World War.

Peter Howarth and A. D. Cousins (eds)

The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet
Cambridge University Press
2011

Beginning with the early masters of the sonnet form, Dante and Petrarch, the Companion examines the reinvention of the sonnet across times and cultures, from Europe to America. In doing so, it considers sonnets as diverse as those by William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, George Herbert and E. E. Cummings.

Peter Howarth

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
Cambridge University Press
2011

This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

David James

Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel
Cambridge University Press
2012

In Modernist Futures, David James examines the implications of modernism's continuity in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing by tracing its political and ethical valences in emerging novelistic practices. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje and Phillip Roth, James reconsiders the purpose of literary innovation as it relates to the artistic and cultural interventions such writers perform.

David James

Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception
Continuum
2008

This study examines the importance of space for the way contemporary novelists experiment with style and form, offering an account of how British writers from the past three decades have engaged with landscape description as a catalyst for innovation.

David James (ed.)

The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction
Cambridge University Press
2011

Bringing together internationally distinguished scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, these essays reveal how the most innovative writers working today draw on the legacies of modernist literature.

Catherine Maxwell

The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne
Manchester University Press
2001

'The female sublime from Milton to Swinburne' examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho.

Catherine Maxwell (ed.)

Algernon Charles Swinburne
J. M. Dent
1997

The last of the Romantics, Swinburne's poems took the public by storm, intoxicated by their rhythms and shocked by his lack of restraint.

Catherine Maxwell

Swinburne
Northcote House
2006

This book introduces the reader to the work for which Swinburne is most famous, concentrating on three major collections as well as a number of his most influential essays. Representative close-readings of selected poems and essays reveal the often complex webs of reference and allusion which give his work depth and richness.

Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds)

Vernon Lee
Hauntings and other Fantastic Tales
Broadview
2006

First published in 1890, Lee's most famous volume of supernatural tales occupies a special place in the literature of the fantastic for its treatment of the femme fatale and the allure of the past, along with the themes of thwarted artistic creativity and psychological obsession.

Catherine Maxwell

Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature
Manchester University Press
2008

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.

Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (eds)

Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Palgrave MacMillan
2006

This timely book is the first collection of critical essays on Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935), the author of forty-three volumes, and a major literary figure and leading European cosmopolitan intellectual whose contribution to the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siécle and to an emergent twentieth-century modernism is currently under re-evaluation.

Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista (eds)

Yearbook of English Studies, 40: The Arts in Victorian Literature
Modern Humanities research Association
2010

The fourteen essays in this collection offer diverse new perspectives on the arts in Victorian Literature. Containing innovative research by leading critics in the field, this collection makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the relations between literature and the arts in the Victorian period.

Claire Preston and Reid Barbour (eds)

Sir Thomas Brown: The World Proposed
Oxford University Press
2008

Doctor, linguist, scientist, natural historian, and writer of what is probably the most remarkable prose in the English language, Sir Thomas Browne was a virtuoso in learning whose many interests form a representative portrait of his age.

Claire Preston

Bee
Reaktion Books
2006

The bee is not a domestic animal, yet our relationship with this creature is one of the longest-standing between humanity and any other species.

Claire Preston

Thomas Browne and the Writing of Early-Modern Science
Cambridge University Press
2005

Claire Preston argues that Thomas Browne's work can be fully understood only within the range of disciplines and practices associated with natural philosophy and early modern empiricism. Early modern methods of cataloguing, collecting, experimentation and observation organised his writing on many subjects from medicine and botany to archaeology and antiquarianism.

Claire Preston

Edith Wharton's Social Register
Macmillan/St Martin's
2000

Edith Wharton's wide reading in the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary theory of her day plays a significant role in her fictions.

Katy Price

Loving Faster than Light: Romance and Readers in Einstein's Universe
University of Chicago Press
2012

Loving Faster than Light focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s.

Joad Raymond (ed.)

News Networks in Seventeenth Century Britain and Europe
Routledge
2005

Examining new research, this excellent volume presents a series of case-studies exemplifying the new newspaper history. Using cross-cultural comparisons, Joad Raymond establishes an agenda for answering crucial questions central to the future histories of the political and literary culture of early-modern Britain.

Joad Raymond and Graham Parry (eds)

Milton and the Terms of Liberty
D. S. Brewer
2002

Taking initiative from both the history of political thought and historicist aesthetics, the essays in this collection (which derive from the International Milton symposium at York) consider the conditions of liberty in Milton's writings.

Joad Raymond

Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain
Cambridge University Press
2003

This book is a unique history of the printed pamphlet in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain and traces its rise as an imaginative and often eloquent literary form. Using a long-term perspective and a broad range of historical, bibliographical and textual evidence, the book sketches a complex definition of a 'pamphlet'.

Joad Raymond

The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649
Clarendon Press
1996

The Invention of the Newspaper is the first interdisciplinary account of the origins and early development of the English newspaper, using both manuscript and printed evidence to account for the precise moment of the newsbook's appearance - a moment just a few months before the outbreak of civil war.

Joad Raymond (ed.)

Conversations with Angels: Essays towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100-1700
Palgrave
2011

This collection offers a new and compelling vision of the place of angels in medieval and early-modern Europe. Through literal and figurative conversations with angels, humans acquired or imagined new forms of knowledge and new understandings of the relationship between God and man and of the arrangement of the natural world.

Joad Raymond (ed.)

News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain
Frank Cass
1999

This volume offers a series of perspectives on the developing relations between news, its material forms, gender, advertising, drama, medicine, national identity, the book trade and public opinion.

Joad Raymond (ed.)

Joad Raymond

Milton's Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination
Oxford University Press
2010

Milton's Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination explores the fate of angels in Reformation Britain, and shows how and why Paradise Lost is a poem about angels that is both shockingly literal and sublimely imaginative.

Christopher Reid and John Mullan (eds)

Eighteenth-Century Popular Culture: A Selection
Oxford University Press
2000

During the eighteenth century, popular culture assumed a peculiar importance; this collection makes available what was once popular but has long been buried.

Christopher Reid

Imprison'd Wranglers: The Rhetorical Culture of the House of Commons, 1760-1800
Oxford University Press
2012

Imprison'd Wranglers looks in detail at the making of a rhetorical culture inside and outside of the House of Commons during the later eighteenth century, a time when Parliament consolidated its authority as a national institution and gained a new kind of prominence in the public eye.

Christopher Reid and Michael Edwards (eds)

Oratory in Action
Manchester university Press
2004

Oratory in Action has an inherent cross-disciplinary appeal and this book should be of interest to undergraduate and more advanced readers in a number of subject areas, such as classical studies, literature, history, law and performance studies.

Margaret Reynolds and Angela Leighton (eds)

Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology
Blackwell
1999

This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets

Margaret Reynolds (ed.)

George Eliot
Adam Bede
Penguin
2008

Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.

Margaret Reynolds

The Sappho History
Palgrave
2003

In The Sappho History, Margaret Reynolds traces the story of the reception of Sappho's poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the mid eighteenth-century to the twentieth-century.

Margaret Reynolds

The Sappho Companion
Chatto and Windus
2000

Sappho is now regarded as the greatest lyrical poet of Greece. Her work survives only in fragments, yet her influence extends throughout Western literature, fuelled by the speculations and romances which have gathered around her name, her story, her sexuality. The Sappho Companion brings together many different kinds of work, ranging from blue-stocking appreciations to juicy fantasies.

Isabel Rivers

The Poetry of Conservatism, 1600-1745: A Study of Poets and Public Affairs from Jonson to Pope
Rivers Press Ltd
1973

Public poetry, which is concerned with the worlds of public order, government, and political events, provides a rewarding source of evidence about the ways in which literature and society may interact. By examining the careers of the major public poets in the period from the reign of James I to the administration of Walpole, the author shows how their work was modified and moulded by the events it was intended to influence.

Isabel Rivers (ed.)

Books and Their Readers in 18th Century England
Leicester University Press
1982

Although this volume does not claim to be a comprehensive survey of books and their readers in the eighteenth century, it breaks new ground to provide much information and interpretation not available elsewhere.

Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (eds)

Joseph Priestley: Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian
Oxford University Press
2008

This collection of essays by a team of experts covers the full range of Priestley's work and provides a new and up to date account of all his activities, together with a summary of his life and an account of his last years in America.

Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (eds)

Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales
Oxford University Press
2011

This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance.

Isabel Rivers

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, volume II: Shaftesbury to Hume
Cambridge University Press
2000 (paperback, 2005)

This volume completes Isabel Rivers' widely acclaimed exploration of the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries. She investigates the effect of attempts to separate ethics from religion, and to locate the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature.

Isabel Rivers

Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, volume I: Whichcote to Wesley
Cambridge University Press
1991 (paperback, 2005)

In this first part of an important two-volume study, Isabel Rivers examines the rise of Anglican moral religion and the reactions against it expressed in nonconformity, dissent and Methodism.

Isabel Rivers (ed.)

Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays
Leicester University Press
2001
[Paperback, Continuum, 2003]

The history of the book is an expanding subject: there has been a revolution in its academic study over the last two decades. This collection of eight new essays investigates the relationship between writers, books and readers in eighteenth-century England and the ways in which different kinds of books were written, edited, published, and disseminated for different audiences.

Isabel Rivers

Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry: A Students' Guide
Routledge
1994, 2nd edn (first published in 1979)

Since publication in 1979 Isabel Rivers' sourcebook has established itself as the essential guide to English Renaissance poetry.

John Barrell and Tim Whelan (eds)

The Political Writings of William Fox
Trent Editions
2011

This edition gathers together all Fox's known writings, with full explanatory notes and an introduction which explains who he was and how he believed he could reconcile his apparently incompatible beliefs.

Matthew Rubery and Stephen Donovan (eds)

Secret Commissions: An Anthology of Victorian Investigative Journalism
Broadview
2012

Secret Commissions brings together nineteen key documents of Victorian investigative journalism; collectively, they show how unsparing descriptions of social injustice became regular features of English journalism long before the advent of American-style "muckraking."

Matthew Rubery

The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News
Oxford university Press
2009

The Novelty of Newspapers highlights the variety of ways the changing world of nineteenth-century journalism shaped the period's most popular literary form.

Matthew Rubery (ed.)

Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies
Routledge
2011

This is the first scholarly work to examine the cultural significance of the "talking book" since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the earliest machine to enable the reproduction of the human voice.

Bill Schwarz (ed.)

The Locations of George Lamming
Macmillan Caribbean
2007

The Locations of George Lamming brings together scholars and critics from across the Atlantic world who present a unique reading of Lamming's imaginative reach.

Bill Schwarz (ed.)

West Indian Intellectuals in Britain
Manchester University Press
2003

The first comprehensive discussion of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to Britain, and a key book for thinking about the future of multicultural Britain.

Bill Schwarz

Caribbean Literature after Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace
Institute for the Study of the Americas
2008

This is the first published volume to assess Lovelace’s fiction and his larger role in Caribbean letters.

Bill Schwarz and Cora Kaplan (eds)

James Baldwin: America and Beyond
University of Michigan Press
2011

This interdisciplinary collection by leading writers in their fields brings together a discussion of the many facets of James Baldwin, both as a writer and as the prophetic conscience of a nation. The core of the volume addresses the shifting, complex relations between Baldwin as an American and his life as an itinerant cosmopolitan.

Bill Schwarz and Susannah Radstone (eds)

Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates
Fordham University Press
2010

In the more than thirty specially commissioned essays that make up this book, leading scholars survey the histories, the theories, and the faultlines that compose the field of memory research.

Bill Schwarz

The White Man's World
Oxford University Press
2011

The White Man's World, the first volume in the Memories of Empire trilogy, explores ideas of the white man as they evolved during the time of the British Empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, looking particularly at the transactions between the colonies and the home society of England.

Morag Shiach (ed.)

The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel
Cambridge University Press
2007

In this 2007 Companion leading critics explore the very significant pleasures of reading modernist novels, but also demonstrate how and why reading modernist fiction can be difficult.

Morag Shiach

Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890-1930
Cambridge University Press
2004

Morag Shiach examines the ways in which labour was experienced and represented between 1890 and 1930.

Nadia Valman and Tony Kushner (eds)

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews'
Ashgate
2004

Philosemitism, Antisemitism and 'the Jews' both honours and carries on the work of The Rev. Dr. James Parkes (1896-1981), a pioneer in the many different fields involving the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations. The collection is designed to examine both the specific and broader themes of Parkes' life work in relation to tolerance and intolerance.

Nadia Valman and Tony Kushner (eds)

Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society
Vallentine Mitchell
2000

This collection presents research on the 1939 confrontation between the police, fascists and anti-fascists in London's Jewish neighbourhood, and its impact on British society.

Nadia Valman

The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture
Cambridge University Press
2007

While previous scholarship has explored the prevalence of antisemitic stereotypes in the nineteenth-century, Nadia Valman argues that the figure of the Jewess - virtuous, appealing and sacrificial - reveals how hostility towards Jews was accompanied by pity, identification and desire.

Nadia Valman and Naomi Hetherington (eds)

Amy Levy: Critical Essays
Ohio University Press
2010

Amy Levy: Critical Essays brings together scholars working in the fields of Victorian cultural history, women’s poetry and fiction, and the history of Anglo-Jewry. The essays trace the social, intellectual, and political contexts of Levy’s writing and its contemporary reception.

Nadia Valman and Eitan Bar-Yosef (eds)

The ‘Jew' in late-Victorian and Edwardian Culture: Between the East End and East Africa
Palgrave
2009

Exploring links between Zionist culture and the British imperial experience, essays in this collection suggest how the methods of postcolonial criticism may be applied both to modern Jewish perceptions of territory and nation and to the image of 'the Jew' in the British political imagination.

Nadia Valman and Bryan Cheyette (eds)

The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789-1914
Vallentine Mitchell
2004

This collection of essays explores the complex articulations and contexts of anti-Semitism in the literature of four cultures - Britain, Germany, France and Italy - in the long nineteenth century. The essays examine the presence both of explicitly anti-Semitic writing and apparently anti-Jewish stereotypes in the work of writers who were not consciously hostile to Jews.

Andrew van der Vlies (ed.)

Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa
Wits University Press
2012

This book explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives—historical, bibliographic, literary-critical, sociological, and cultural studies.

Andrew van der Vlies

South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read all Over
Manchester University Press
2007

Nation' and 'literature' are always inherently unstable categories but, in the case of South Africa, this instability is particularly marked. This study considers the effects local and global networks had on the publication, promotion and reception of a series of key writers and their works between 1883 and 2005.

Andrew van der Vlies

J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace: A Reader's Guide
Continuum
2010

This introduction offers an indispensable guide to the historical contexts and critical ideas necessary for an informed and rewarding engagement with one of the most significant novels of the last quarter century. Offering an overview of the author's career, informed discussion of the novel's setting and references, this guide considers such issues as the representation of race, gender, the land, and animals, and its concern with language, power, music, confession, and allegory.

James Vigus, Klaus Vieweg and Kathleen M. Wheeler (eds)

Shandean Humour in English and German Literature and Philosophy
Oxford University Press
2013

One of many writers inspired by Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the German novelist Jean Paul Richter coined the term ‘Shandean humour’ in his work of aesthetic theory. The essays in this volume investigate how Sterne’s humour functions, the reasons for its enduring appeal, and what role it played in identity-construction and in the representation of melancholy.

James Vigus

Coleridge's Afterlives
Palgrave MacMillan
2008

In this volume, fourteen specially commissioned essays examine for the first time the breadth and variety of Coleridge's afterlives. Topics include philosophy, gender, education, American literature, South Asian literature, aesthetics, narrative, literary criticism and poetry.

James Vigus and Helmut Huhn (eds)

Symbol and Intuition: Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-Period Aesthetics
Oxford University Press
2013

The international contributors to this volume explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson.

James Vigus (ed.)

Henry Crabb Robinson, Essays on Kant, Schilling, and German Aesthetics
Modern Humanities Research Association
2010

As a student at the University of Jena at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867) became the outstanding English mediator of the revolution in German thought.

For the first time, this volume collects his early writings, both published and unpublished.

James Vigus (ed.)

Informal Romanticism
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier
2012

Frequently drawing on new editorial scholarship in the period, the contributions to this volume collectively illuminate one of the most enticing yet hitherto least appreciated aspects of Romanticism: its informality.

James Vigus

Platonic Coleridge
Legenda
2009

James Vigus’s study traces Coleridge’s discovery of a Plato marginalised in the universities, and examines his use of German sources on the ‘divine philosopher’, and his Platonic interpretation of Kant’s epistemology.

Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (eds)

Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 1650-1850
Palgrave
2005

This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the creative, controversial role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

Barbara Taylor

Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century
Harvard University Press
1983

This book, winner of the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1983, recovers the connections between socialist aims and feminist aspirations.

Barbara Taylor and Adam Phillips

On Kindness
Penguin
2009

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of kindness in history, in life and in the modern world.

Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander (eds)

History & Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis and the Past
Palgrave
2012

Recent decades have seen a growing interest in psychoanalysis across the Humanities. History and Psyche brings together some of the best work in this area, including topics such as Luther and psychobiography, empathy and historical subjectivity, the political history of the Oedipus complex, and childhood in early modernity.

Barbara Taylor

Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination
Cambridge University Press
2003

In this in-depth 2003 study of Wollstonecraft's thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment.