English 242 - British Literature

The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English is the definitive guide to the vast and extraordinarily rich heritage of literature written in English. It covers all the major novelists, poets and dramatists - from Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens to Conrad and to contemporary writers from all over the English-speaking world

The British Literary Heritage is virtually unrivaled in the Western world, and this large, lavishly illustrated volume explores the richness, diversity, and continuity of that tradition, from its first stirrings in Anglo-Saxon poetry to the present day.
At the heart of the chronicle is the towering figure of Shakespeare, who receives a full chapter to himself. Other figures treated in depth are Chaucer, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickens, Eliot, and Auden

Professor Wheeler's widely-acclaimed survey of the nineteenth-century fiction covers both the major writers and their works and encompasses the genres and "minor" fiction of the period. This excellent introduction and reference source has been revised for this second edition to include new material on lesser-known writers and a comprehensively updated bibliography.

This accessible new survey of British writers since 1939 reveals how literature in Britain was affected by the most devastating war in history, and how it engaged with public events and private feelings during the fighting and throughout the long aftermath of recovery. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, Bernard Bergonzi, one of Britain's leading critics, discusses the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Angus Wilson, Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, and William Golding. Written for general readers as well as for students of literature and history, this perceptive study provides a readable and informative introduction to the literature of modern Britain

Pairing free verse with over three hundred pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations, Mary's Monster is a unique and stunning biography of Mary Shelley, the pregnant teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen is one of the world's most popular novelists, a sharp and witty writer whose stories enchant on their own and in numerous film and TV adaptations. Jane Austen's World takes a look at the woman behind the literature, revealing her private life and examining the world she inhabited--a time when England was developing into a colonial power, the Napoleonic Wars raged, and the Regency took hold. No other book truly captures Austen's spirit as well

In this three-volume landmark work, the authors of the classic The Madwoman in the Attic provide an overview of modern literature in England and America, bringing feminist theory to bear on writings by men as well as women. Illustrated

The Golden Age of Murder tells for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective fiction between the two World Wars. A gripping real-life detective story, it investigates how Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie and their colleagues in the mysterious Detection Club transformed crime fiction. Their work cast new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets, and their complex and sometimes bizarre private lives.

Science fiction is at the intersection of numerous fields. It is a literature which draws on popular culture, and which engages in speculation about science, history, and all types of social relations. This volume brings together essays by scholars and practitioners of science fiction, which look at the genre from these different angles. After an introduction to the nature of science fiction, historical chapters trace science fiction from Thomas More to more recent years, including a chapter on film and television. The second section introduces four important critical approaches to science fiction drawing their theoretical inspiration from Marxism, postmodernism, feminism and queer theory

This Companion is both an alphabetically arranged reference work and, in its sum, a history, a map of modern poetry in English. From the last decade of the century, it offers a survey of the terrain, from 1900 to the present.

This volume offers a comprehensive selection of contemporary criticism of three great Romantic poets, ranging from traditional literary scholarship through historicist, feminist, structuralist and poststructuralist readings

This is the first one-volume analysis of British drama, from 1890-1990, covering the most dynamic and exciting period in its history since Shakespeare. Starting with George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Innes traces the evolution of modernism from the close of the nineteenth century right up to the present.

Because whenever they wrote the members of Bloomsbury tried to write well, there is an abundant variety of illuminating and delightful reading to be found in the short prose works of the Group's novelists, biographers, critics, and even political economists. In " A Bloomsbury Group Reader Professor Rosenbaum offers a representative selection of such writings by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Vanessa Bell. His focus in this selection is not upon the lives of the Group but upon what finally must justify our interest in them: their work, in this instance, as writers

Thompson galvanized audiences in New York and in England with his unique blend of historical analysis and literary acuity as he examined the turbulent 1790s through the work of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Mary Wollstonecraft, and that of such less well-known authors as William Godwin and John Thelwall.