Books in the Oxford English Monographs series

This volume explores the poetry of W. H. Auden, J. H. Prynne, and Paul Muldoon with specific attention to the ways in which their work has engaged with etymology and the history of language.

In a 1925 speech, Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' Thomas Karshan draws on untranslated early writings and restricted archival material to argue that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that his novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved.

This history of reading for Middle English poetry combines close readings, detailed case studies of surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period.

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 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.

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.

This book presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English Revolution by focusing on royalist poets who left the cause behind following the execution of the king.

A study of the reception of Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-90) that explores the responses in England and Scotland to Du Bartas's epic masterpiece, the Semaines; the development of his reputation; and the relation of his work to English epic verse, including the works of Spenser, Milton, and Hutchinson.

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.

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.

The early modern period saw the study of classical history flourish. This study explores the early modern translations of Livy, the single most important Roman historian for the development of politics and culture in Renaissance Europe.

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.

This book explores the complex and contested relationships that existed between class, patronage, and poetry in Hanoverian England by examining the life and work of Stephen Duck, the 'famous threshing poet'. Duck's remarkable story reveals the tolerances, and intolerances, of the Hanoverian social order.

By showing how Langland transformed Conscience as he composed the A, B and C texts of Piers Plowman, Sarah Wood offers a new approach to reading the serial versions of the poem. While the three versions have customarily been read in parallel-text formats, she demonstrates that Langland's revisions are newly comprehensible if read in sequence.

The study examines Coleridge's formative double-vision as it manifests itself in his profound self-analysis, his philosophy of mind, his reflections on love and ethics, his descriptions of imagination, and his literary criticism.

This book is the first full-length study of two key magazines published in Britain before the First World War: Rhythm and the Blue Review, which were edited by and featured authors including John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, and D.H. Lawrence. It brings a fresh and challenging perspective to the ongoing reappraisal of modernism.

Part of the OXFORD ENGLISH MONOGRAPHS series offering a study of the works of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin and others in the context of changing attitudes to fiction in Elizabethan England and exploring their violations of current conventions, mockery of platitudes, self-conscious stylishness and subtlety.

Ben Brice examines Coleridge's poetry and prose between 1795 and 1825 in the context of important philosophical and theological debates with which the poet was familiar. He explores Coleridge's scepticism about his own theory of symbolism, which was so fundamental to his poetic vision, and presents a new and original account of why this anxiety and doubt was present in Coleridge's writings.

A re-examination of Oscar Wilde's plays which challenges views of the writer as a dilettante and dandy, revealing him instead as a serious philosopher and social critic who used his plays to subvert the traditional values of Victorian literature and society.

A comprehensive study of the impact of Middle English romance on "The Faerie Queene". It employs the concept of memory, in which both Middle English romance writers and Spenser show specific interest, to build a sense of the thematic, generic and cultural complexity of the native romance tradition.

Considering Eliot's intense interest in anthropology and his debt to Victorian urban writing and popular American models, this book attempts to throw new light on Eliot's major works, particularly the earlier ones culminating in "The Waste Land" and "Sweeney Agonistes".

Examines the work of a 13th-century scribe, known as the "tremulous hand of Worcester", who glossed some 50,000 Old English words into Latin and Middle English. The book attempts to answer questions regarding his methods, use of sources, knowledge of Old English and the purpose of his glossing.

This is a comparative study in English of Old Icelandic and Old English wisdom poetry. It examines problems of form, unity and coherence, and how the genre responds to social change.

Mary Leapor (1722-1746), a Northamptonshire kitchen maid, produced a substantial body of exceptional poetry which was only published after her death at the age of 24. This book examines Leapor's poetry.

This text provides readings of Anais Nin through contemporary feminist approaches, using Nin to make an intervention into critical debates around modernism, feminism, psychoanalysis, writing, identity, fictionality and femininity.

Carl Thompson examines the romance that can attach to the notion of suffering in travel, and the importance of the persona of 'suffering traveller' for Romantic writers and travellers such as Wordsworth and Byron. Surveying branches of Romantic-era travel writing such as shipwreck, captivity, and exploration narratives, he considers how and why the Romantics typically chose to imitate the hapless protagonists of these accounts, rather than to play the moreconventional roles of picturesque and Grand Tourist.

What is the relevance of the Irish Revival to modernism? Why did Yeats's vision of a theatre for Ireland take a ritual form? What was so incendiary about J. M. Synge's vision of the Irish peasantry? These are among the questions that Garrigan Mattar seeks to answer by exploring the primitivism of the Irish Revival in relation to comparative science.

This book examines some of Donne's figurations of the feminine in his lesser known poetry and prose, allowing a deeper appreciation of his contribution to Renaissance literature. Using the criticism of feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, Meakin shows how Donne's explorations of love, eroticism, friendship and the divine are still relevant today.

There has been a new interest recently in the intersection of the visual and the verbal in Samuel Richardson's novels, from his use of spatial and pictorial imagery, to the contemporary illustrations to Pamela. This lavishly-illustrated book goes one step further, considering the novels in the context of 18th-century portraiture.