Books in the Contexts series

Victorian Fiction offers the reader an insight into the cultural, political, and social contexts in which the major Victorian novels were written and read.

Looking at poetry and fiction against the 'spirit of the age', this book discusses issues of science and art, psychology and the supernatural, revolutionary politics and social vision, satire and morality.

The early Twentieth Century produced some of the most exhilarating writing in English. Writers from Britain, America and Ireland were challenging literary conventions in order to seek to accommodate their changed perspective upon a dynamic but newly unsettling world.

In defining postmodernism, this book compares and contrasts it with modernism by placing it in its historical context. Gregson discusses Jean-Francois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard - and demonstrates how their theories illuminate the work of postmodern novelists including Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie.

How did dramatists engage with the unprecedented levels of socio-cultural and intellectual change in Renaissance England, a time when ideas of identity, sexuality, social order, religion and state power were in flux? The book provides a contextual introduction to the work of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Dekker, Webster, Middleton and Ford.

This book looks at a range of writers including Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Richardson and Jonathan Swift. By combining fresh readings of familiar and unfamiliar texts with a new enquiry into the relationship between writers and their world, it provides a thorough and wide-ranging account of an energetic and troubled age.