Books in the Clarendon Lectures in English series

This book argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. Victoria Kahn contrasts modern and early modern understandings of the terms, and focuses on the works of Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, and J.M. Coetzee.

It takes a strong woman to secure bookish remembrance in future times. The four fascinating Catholic women considered here - Dorothea of Montau (1347-1394), Margery Kempe of Lynn (c. 1373-c. 1440), Mary Ward of Yorkshire (1585-1645), and Elizabeth Cary of Drury Lane (c. 1585-1639) - shock, surprise, and court historical danger.

Quentin Skinner highlights the use of judicial rhetoric in some of Shakespeare's most famous works, shedding new light on Shakespeare's reading and the intellectual base of his work.

Myths and tales of metamorphosis, from Leda and the swan to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, command great excitement and pleasure among readers. This book explores stories of transformation, in poetry, fiction, and painting. It shows how ideas about human personality, such as the zombie and the doppelganger, develop in the encounter between cultures.

This study explores the relationship between art and political power in society, beginning with the experience of writers in contemporary Africa. It then raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state and the state of art, between the artists and the guardians of a modern state.

What happens when civilization crumbles? What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? These are the questions asked by Yeats's poem 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'. Michael Wood explores the life of this poem through its form and historical context, examining how it seeks to make sense of a chaotic world whilst preserving the disorder of experience.

Iconoclasm is not a barbaric act which takes place somewhere else but is instead a central strand of Anglo-American modernity. Our horror at the destruction of art derives in part from the fact that we did, and still do, that. This is most obviously true of England's iconoclastic century between 1538 and 1643, which stands at the core of this book.

This critical study of Samuel Beckett's writing explores his deep convictions concerning life and death. It argues that throughout his writing, Beckett longed for oblivion and harboured the ancient belief that it is better to be dead than alive.

This text argues for an expansion of the boundaries of "English" and the importance of psychoanalysis in understanding literary and historical lives. It also explores the place of Israel/Palestine and South Africa in the English literary and cultural imagination.

Traces the emergence of a national tradition in Irish writing from the era of Edmund Burke's counter-revolutionary writings. The book claims Irish writing is dominated by inherited issues and the activities of Irish print culture take place within the limits imposed by this complex inheritance.

Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading is a literary critic's approach to the range of meanings and activities involved in reading, understood from a psychoanalytic perspective. In thematically linked essays, the author explores writing by novelists such as Austen, Rousseau, and Woolf, as well as fictional accounts of slavery and Holocaust memoirs.

A short thought-provoking book on the relation between psychology and morality in contemporary culture and current literary criticism.

Explores the use made by poets and novelists of street songs and cries with a particular focus on nineteenth and early twentieth century writers including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, George Gissing, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust.

Richly illustrated with manuscripts, printed objects, and art works, Bibliophobia tells a 5000-year history of writing and of books to give readers a fascinating account of why books matter and how they impact on our lives.