Books in the New Casebooks series

This collection of essays is aimed at students who are working on The Merchant of Venice and who are looking for new ways of thinking about the play and new ways of thinking about their own practice as critics.

Thomas Hardy has long been critically constructed as 'poet of Wessex' and 'novelist of Character and Environment'. This volume offers to deconstruct such a mythic 'Hardy' in selecting contemporary critical essays which re-present Tess from very different critical perspectives.

Roald Dahl is one of the world's best-loved authors. More than twenty years after his death, his books are still highly popular with children and have inspired numerous feature films - yet he remains a controversial figure.This volume, the first collection of academic essays ever to be devoted to Dahl's work, brings together a team of well-known scholars of children's literature to explore the man, his books for children, and his complex attitudes towards various key subjects. Including essays on education, crime, Dahl's humour, his long-term collaboration with the artist Quentin Blake, and film adaptations, this fascinating collection offers a unique insight into the writer and his world.

As well as essays on The Longest Journey, A Room With a View, Maurice, Howards End and A Passage to India, the volume includes a specially-commissioned essay on the recent spate of Forster films.

This volume brings together a wide range of original, scholarly essays on key figures and topics in medieval literature by leading academics. The volume examines the major authors such as Chaucer, Langland and the Gawain Poet, and covers key topics in medieval literature, including gender, class, courtly and popular culture, and religion. The volume seeks to provide a fresh and stimulating guide to medieval literature.

Emerging from the shadow of popular reproductions, Frankenstein's importance in debates about gender, culture and politics has been dramatically affected by recent developments in criticism and theory.

This New Casebook provides an overview of the criticism of work by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, and an introduction to the key works and issues in African-American literary scholarship.

Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy enthrals children through its storytelling but is also an ambitious and sophisticated work. This collection, consisting of brand new essays by an international team of scholars, provides both an overview and a critical assessment of the trilogy's reputation and its place within modern children's literature.

This New Casebook on Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy (Richard II, Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V) is an anthropology of contemporary criticism, all produced within the last twenty years, most within the last ten.

This volume presents a broad range of critical essays exemplifying different approaches to Shakespeare's two comedies, The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing.

The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades.

Gathers together interpretations of Beckett's best-known plays, illustrating a range of theoretical approaches from deconstruction to reader-response theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Steven Connor has written books on Dickens, Beckett and Postmodernist culture.

The new critical approaches that have swept through literary criticism in recent years have transformed our sense of David Copperfield and Hard Times.

The collection as a whole demonstrates a variety of recent critical approaches to the genre, including feminist, psychoanalytic, new historicist and cultural materialist viewpoints, inspiring students to revisit these plays and to engage directly with the politics of the past and present, and the ways in which they interrelate.

This collection of recent essays on James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, provides an up-to-date overview of debates in Joycean scholarship, with particular emphasis on gender, postcolonial and ideological critiques, and deconstructive readings.

This book features a collection of essays on some of the key poets of post-war America, written by leading scholars in the field. All the essays have been newly commissioned to take account of the diverse movements in American poetry since 1945, and also to reflect, retrospectively, on some of the major talents that have shaped its development.In the aftermath of the Second World War, American poets took stock of their own tumultuous past but faced the future with radically new artistic ideals and commitments. More than ever before, American poetry spoke with its own distinctive accents and declared its own dreams and desires. This is the era of confessionalism, beat poetry, protest poetry, and avant-garde postmodernism. This book explores the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, as well as contemporary African American poets and new poetic voices emerging in the twenty-first century. This New Casebook introduces the major American poets of the post-war generation, evaluates their achievements in the light of changing critical opinion, and offers lively, incisive readings of some of the most challenging and enthralling poetry of the modern era.

This New Casebook explores the enduring significance of George Eliot's novels The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861).

Julius Caesar: A New Casebook provides students and academics with a selection of important essays by leading contemporary critics on Shakespeare's first "Globe" play.

The Tempest has not only generated many creative adaptations in drama, poetry, novels and films, but it has also proved a testing ground for virtually all the new literary theories available.

This New Casebook offers a wide-ranging selection of contemporary critical readings of Shakespeare's three 'problem plays': All's Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida.

The essays are by writers working at the forefront of current criticism, and not only provide an overview of contemporary readings of one of the seminal works of English literature, but also indicate the range and subtlety of the revolution in English studies that has taken place in the past two decades.

New Casebook offers a selection of the most lively and innovative contemporary criticism on the four late plays commonly known as Shakespeare's 'Romances': Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Collecting together essays which offer detailed accounts of particular plays, along with others that take a broader overview of the field, this casebook showcases the range of critical strategies used in feminist criticism of Shakespeare.

The essays are drawn from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, covering language, history, psychoanalysis, feminism and the relation of the novels to modernism, and look forward to new developments in Lawrence scholarship.

Employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches - including reader response theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cultural materialism and a range of feminisms - these essays examine Collins's fiction from several perspectives: historical, psychological, structural, generic and political (including gender politics).

This New Casebook on Seamus Heaney follows the astonishingly rapid growth of a literary reputation. In particular, the Casebook shows how a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches have been brought into play as Heaney has become increasingly central for general readers of poetry, academics and students at school and university.

In The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster reworked the idea of a female tragic protagonist explored in his earlier and less well-received play The White Devil.

Aphra Behn's work has always been subject to critical fashion and her literary reputation was only really secured in the closing decade of this century, especially by new historicist and feminist critics.

A new collection of recent essays by the most important scholars, critics and theorists of today, with a lively and accessible introduction by Alan Sinfield. This New Casebook is full of exciting ideas about Macbeth and is a convenient way to assess recent critical developments through the work of the best current commentators on Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's tragedies - the plays which represent human experience in its starkest and most terrifying dimensions - are crucial to the postmodern study of early modern subjectivity.