Books in the Major European Authors Series series

This is a critical study of the group of talented poets who flourished in Spain between the First World War and the Spanish Civil War.

In this 1976 introduction to Brecht's theatre and theory, Ronald Gray explores the dramatist's interacting roles as a committed Marxist seeking to influence audiences and as one of the most innovative craftsmen ever to work in the theatre.

This is a digital reprint of Mme de Mourgues' critical introduction to the work of Racine. It concentrates entirely on the plays themselves, and attempts to say what they are and how they work on the mind of the spectator or reader.

Professor de Mourgues' study of seventeenth-century classical French writers La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere investigates the term 'moralist' and how it applies to the two writers. This study raises delicate questions of interpretation, and adds equally to the fascination of the two writers' work.

Coleman sees Rabelais as finding a particular form - Menippean satire - in which he could achieve a balance between seriousness and irony, involvement and detachment, direct address to the reader and distance, and in which he was able to develop his own unique language.

This study explores the evolution of Moliere's comedy as a vehicle for his own talents as an actor and for the resources of his company. The author also seeks to define the composition of the original audiences, both in the public theatre and at Court, and to assess the taste and attitudes of the spectators for whom the plays were written.

This book is a comprehensive study of the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. As well as examining the drama and the fiction, the book analyses the evolution of his philosophy, explores his concern with ethics, psychoanalysis, literary theory, biography and autobiography and includes a lengthy section on the still much-neglected study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille.

Professor Parker's essays provide a wide-ranging survey of Calderon's secular, three-act plays (comedias) through detailed analyses of individual works. The themes found in the plays are studied in relation to the background of ideas in seventeenth-century Spain and to the development of Calderon's own view of the intellectual life and the social, ethical and moral problems of this age.

Professor Hackett concentrates on Rimbaud's poems, especially the more important of the early verse poems, the Lettre du voyant, the 1872 verse poems and the major writings, Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer. This critical survey, originally published in 1981, will interest the specialist, students and the general reader.

This 1982 book was the first major critical study of Jaroslav Hasek and his most important literary creation, The Good Soldier Svejk. Cecil Parrott begins from the point of view that a closer examination of the conditions under which the book was written reveal it to be a much deeper work than it appears on the surface.

Boileau has traditionally been regarded as the spokesman of French neo-classicism but some elements of scholarship have discounted the importance of neo-classical doctrine in general and of Boileau's particular contribution to it. Pocock examines Boileau's commitment to French neo-classicism and his embodiment of it in his work.

This is a concise survey and criticism of Goethe's work, for the general reader and the student. The book can be used in conjunction with Dr GrayAEs selection of the poems; the two books together are the best possible introduction to one of the greatest European men of letters.

This 1977 critical introduction to Chekhov examines his development and achievement as prose-writer and dramatist. Beverly Hahn draws attention to the depth of Chekhov's imagination, and makes a strong case for viewing him as a humanist actively interested in modern European theories and ideas, but committed to celebrating the unpredictability of human lives.

This 1973 text provides a critical introduction to the writings of Franz Kafka. Within it Ronald Gray surveys the novels and short stories, and glances also at the religious or confessional writings. He presents a persuasive and coherent account of Kafka's personal and artistic development and its meaning and value for us.

In this first critical assessment in English of Pushkin's writing, the author examines his achievement in relation to Russian literature and the European tradition.

This is a critical introduction to the novels and short stories of Tolstoy, treating them in their own right as works of literature, not as biographical evidence or contributions to a philosophical system. The heart of the book, inevitably, is in the examination of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but most of Tolstoy's other fiction is also discussed.

Upon publication this was the full, post-glasnost critical biography of Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). Lesley Milne traces Bulgakov's career from the ethical concept of the writer's role, his response to his time, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, and his search for an audience in and beyond that time.

This is one of the first studies to treat Valery's theory and practice of poetry together and is the first full-length study of his poetry in English. Discussion of his ideas on poetic composition leads to a detailed analysis of the principal poetry: the long term poem La Jeune Parque and all the poems in the main collection.