Books in the Oxford English Monographs series

Reading Veganism focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Through veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the 'human,' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted.

This book examines 'metafiction' - writing that is about writing - after the Second World War.

A collection of American poetic responses to the Vietnam War. This title should be of interest to specialists in Vietnam studies, American literature and war poetry, and the general reader interested in these and similar issues.

Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women's Literary Responses to the Great War rediscovers the neglected literature of war. Romance novels and active service memoirs are the focus of this critical, yet accessible, study. Heavily illustrated, it demonstrates the ways in which popular literature played its role in both the entertainment and the reassurance of the nation.

Shakespeare's late plays are usually seen in terms of courtliness and escapism; but the author of this text considers that the critical tradition has been too decorous. This study reappraises the origins and prospects of the authority, language, and decorum in the late plays.

This book explores the significance of tenancy in Charles Dickens's fiction. Dickens's conception of domesticity was nuanced, and through his works he describes the chaos and unxpected harmony to be found in rented spaces.

This book tells the timely and much-needed story of the state's interest in supporting literary production in post-war Britain. Working with unexamined sources it charts the forgotten record of state sponsorship into conversation with Britain's transformation into a successful multicultural democracy.

Henry James criticized the impressionism movement, yet time and again used the word 'impressio' to represent his characters's consciousness, as well as the work of the literary artist. This book explores this anomaly, placing James's work within the wider cultural history of impressionism.

This book examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout this career. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.

This volume explores the influence of the avant-garde French novel form known as Nouveau Roman on experimental prose fiction and post-war literary culture in Britain.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which twenty-century novelists responded to visual art and how writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period.

Focuses on the representation of masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders and comprehensively interrogates the construction, operation, and problematization of masculinities in this genre.

When we think of writers today, we often think of them as thin and poor-as starving artists. This book traces the history of this idea, and asks why hunger has been such a compelling metaphor for thinking about writing in modern times.

This book shows how Ashbery's poetry has been centrally concerned with questions of national identity and intercultural poetic exchange. Through detailed close readings of his poetry, original interviews, and extensive archival research, a new account of Ashbery's aesthetic, and a significant re-mapping of post-war English poetry, is presented.

Focusing on Second Generation New York School poetry from 1960 to the present day, this volume explores the poets who lived and wrote from or about New York, the forms of their poems, and the a relationship between the structures they inhabited and the structures they created.

Modernist Physics studies literary texts and scientific ideas in their historical context to provide an original account of the ways in which Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence engaged with the scientific theories, especially those of Albert Einstein.

The first extended examination of the influence of monasticism on Wordsworth's writing. Covering the poet's development between 1806 and 1822, it considers how a series of sources describing medieval monastic life in the north of England influenced Wordsworth's thinking about regional attachment, trans-historical community, and national cohesion.

Draws on the unpublished writings of Charles Olson and situates his work in the context of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and music to tell the story of how American poets and artists reimagined art and literature for the post-war world.

Kelsey Jackson Williams presents the first full account of the manuscript notebooks of the antiquary John Aubrey (1626-1697), which cover everything from the origins of Stonehenge to the evolution of folklore. He reshapes our understanding of Aubrey, and of the methodologies, ambitions, and achievements of antiquarianism across early modern Europe.

A detailed exploration of a significant work of Tudor literature, The Mirror for Magistrates. The volume shows how the text is more than a moralistic collection of poems and how it is concerned with the transmission of national history, and the ways in which the past can be distorted, misremembered, misinterpreted, or lost.

Duncan White draws on previously unpublished and neglected material to tell the story of Nabokov the professional writer; to explore how he balanced his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace; and to reconceptualise the way we think about one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century.

This volume examines how literature was central to the debates about royal succession and political culture of the early eighteenth century. It reshapes our understanding of writers such as Daniel Defoe, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison, as well as our understanding of political, literary, and material cultures of the time.

Stephen J. Ross examines the concept of nature in the work of John Ashbery. Through close readings of Ashbery's poetry and critical prose, he reveals Ashbery's work to be a case study of the dramatic transformation of nature in art and literature since World War II.

How are a reader's perceptions of a plot impacted by its presentation through textual clues rather than explicit narration, and why would an author choose this comparatively indirect mode of narration? Conspicuous Silences examines the effect of this literary strategy on the reader's experience of a selection of Victorian novels.

A study of how three modernist poets (Yeats, Jones, & Eliot) at the height of their careers drew on their religious beliefs to transform some of their greatest poems into maps of the relationship between history and eternity.

Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth.

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W.B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, identifying mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric and charting them against key intersections in the two men's lives.

Committed Styles offers a new understanding of the literature of the 1930s and its relationship to modernism, exploring the tensions between formal experimentation and political vision that lie at the heart of the politicised literature of the 1930s.

Focusing on the writing of John Thelwall, Thomas Paine, Helen Maria Williams, William Godwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, he Majesty of the People examines how theories about the role of the intellectual or the writer were developed as part of the 1790s' contestation of the concept of the majesty of the people.

The Poetics of Commemoration is a study of the role poetry played in the commemoration of kings during the Viking Age, investigating the variety of ways in which poets responded to the death of a king, and how poetry helped to constructed a shared memory and identity for the community he left behind.