Books in the Oxford English Monographs series

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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 book not only provides a detailed analysis of Johnson's relationship with the ethics and theology of the 18th century, examining the background to his views on a wide range of issues debated by the philosophers and divines of his age but also challenges the assumption that Johnson's religious beliefs were unstable and filled with anxiety.

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.

Forms of Engagement sheds light on questions of poetic form in women's poetry. It traces the influences on the work of Lucy Hutchinson, Katherine Philips, and Margaret Cavendish, allowing readers to understand better both how women composed their poems and how they engaged with their contemporaries.

This book is about ideas of sympathy in the early twentieth-century novel. It offers a new reading of literary modernism, challenging notions of modernism as hostile to emotion and empathy. It also offers a new intervention into the growing field of literature and emotion studies.

Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions asks why Catholicism had such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice. Concentrating on dramatic impact, and integrating literary analysis with fresh historical research, Gillian Woods offers a new and engaging answer to this important question.

This is the first book-length study of John Skelton (1460-1529) for almost twenty years, and the first to link his poetic theory with his practice as a writer and translator. Reassessing Skelton's place in the English literary canon, it suggests the need to reconsider the conventional distinction between 'Medieval' and 'Renaissance' poetics.

The Poet's Mind is a comprehensive study of the ways in which Victorian poets thought and wrote about the human mind. It argues that these poets used their writing both to express psychological processes of thought and feeling and to subject those processes to scrutiny and analysis.

This book investigates how Syon Abbey responded to the religious turbulence of the 1520s and 1530s. It examines the books three brothers - William Bonde, John Fewterer, and Richard Whitford - produced and argues that the Bridgettines used vernacular printing to engage with religious and political developments that threatened their orthodox faith.

Scarlett Baron explores the works of two of the most admired and mythologized masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose: Gustave Flaubert (1822-1880) and James Joyce (1882-1941). She uncovers the lifelong fascination that Joyce harboured for Flaubert and investigates how this heightened interest inflected his own creative practice.

This study reappraises Sir Thomas Wyatt (c.1504-1542) as a poetic innovator. It discusses Wyatt's reflections on the writing process, and his awareness of how words can be turned in new directions - that is, rewritten, amended, transformed, manipulated, even performed - over the course of a text's production, transmission, and reception.

A study of the complex structure of the sonnets of Philip Sidney and writers influenced by him. The book argues that construction of such intricate mathematical patterns suggests the patterns themselves had significance, and offers cosmological explanations which challenge orthodox 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.

After a mid-career adoption of French as a language of composition, Beckett continued to write in his native English as well as French, and to translate his work, often unfaithfully, between the two. This study focuses on how Beckett's self-translation emerges as a crucial aspect of his exploration of uncertainty, exile, and the myth of identity.

This book explores the development of artists' biographies in the cultural context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting.

Through close readings of the poems and prose essays of Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill, Defending Poetry makes a timely intervention in current debates about literature's ethics, arguing that any ethics of literature ought to take into account not only poetry, but also the writings of poets on the value of poetry.

This book argues that the significance of Coetzee's complex and finely-nuanced fiction lies in the acuity with which it both explores and develops the tradition of the novel - ranging from Cervantes, Defoe, and Richardson, to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Beckett - as part of a sustained attempt to rethink the relationship between writing and politics.

This text provides a reading of Walter Scott's "Waverley Novels" in the context of 18th- and 19th-century Gothic. Including analyses of such neglected works as "The Fortunes of Nigel", "Peveril of the Peak", and "Woodstock" it focuses on questions of narrative authority and historical authenticity.

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.

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.

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.

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.