Books in the European Studies in English Literature series

This 1981 study of the street ballad was the first to investigate a specific genre of popular literature which had previously been vastly neglected.

The image of the 'fallen woman' was a common one in Elizabethan literature. This 1990 study, translated from the original German by the author, deals with an unconventional aspect of the motif; the genre of 'complaint' in which writers enabled women to put their own case, stressing private rather than public virtues.

First published in German in 1960, this text places the English critic, essayist and novelist in a philosophical tradition whose major exponents were Hegel and Coleridge, at the same time showing how Pater differed crucially from these thinkers to become representative of a late Victorian culture critically poised in transition between Romanticism and Modernism.

Professor Kohl's aim is to gain fresh insight into his literary and critical oeuvre of Oscar Wilde. He analyses each of his works on the basis of a textually oriented interpretation, taking equal account of the biographical and intellectual contexts through the use of contradictions that Wilde show as individualism and convention.

Dickens's plots, often dismissed as conventional or cheaply sensational, are here considered as the embodiment of Dickens's preoccupation with rituals of succession. Sadrin shows how the simple pattern of quest for father develops in Dickens's later novels into an extended exploration of the triple inheritance of looks, name and property.

This study of both literature and the visual arts is comparative in nature, attempting to establish an English symbolist tradition as part of an international development linking the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Originally published by Cambridge in 1988, Lother Hoennighausen's book includes illustrations and a survey of critical works.

This book is the first comprehensive study of the theory, the conventions and the history of the mock-heroic genre. In the first part, Ulrich Broich shows how mock-heroic poetry combines the characteristics of various discourses - epic, comedy, parody, satire and occasional poetry. The second part traces the history of mock-heroic poetry.

Shakespeare's plays draw extensively on the events and traditions of Elizabethan festivals and holidays, mingling popular and aristocratic or royal forms of entertainment in ways that combine or clash to produce new meaning. This book offers an exciting new perspective on Shakespeare's relation to popular culture.

The mystery plays of medieval England have traditionally been analysed in ways which centre on the texts and their religious significance. This major study seeks to recover their dramatic potential by focusing on the function of speech and dramatic form in the plays.

Hermann Fischer's lively and original 1991 study of Romantic verse narrative traces in comprehensive detail the origins and development of this poetic form in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This translation, extensively revised and updated, makes Hermann Fischer's acclaimed study available for the first time in English.

Manfred Pfister's book is the first to provide a coherent comprehensive framework for the analysis of plays in all their dramatic and theatrical dimensions. The material on which his analysis is based covers all genres and periods. His approach is systematic rather than historical, combining more abstract categorisations with detailed interpretations of sample texts.