Books in the Studies in Major Literary Authors series

Investigates the connections between Poe and the nineteenth-century flaneur - or strolling urban observer - and the centrality of the flaneur to Poe's literary aims and intimate yet ambivalent relationship with his surrounding culture.

Provides a critique of Paul Auster's writings.

Analyzes the relationship between race and genre in four of Toni Morrison's novels: "The Bluest Eye", "Tar Baby", "Jazz", and "Beloved". This book argues how Morrison's novels revise conventional generic forms such as bildungsroman, folktales, slave narratives, and the formal realism of the novel itself.

Examines Charles Dickens' weekly family magazine "Household Words" in order to develop a picture of how the journal negotiated, asserted and simultaneously deconstructed Englishness as a unified (and sometimes unifying) mode of expression.

Examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in "The Diary of Virginia Woolf". As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction.

Reassesses Pynchon's literary career in order to explain the central role played by the racialization of American culture in the postmodernist deconstruction of subjectivity and literary authority and in the crisis in white liberal culture. This book charts the evolution of these cultural transformations from Pynchon's short stories.

Examining the ways F Scott Fitzgerald portrayed spectator sports as working to help structure ideologies of class, community and nationhood, this book shows how narratives of attending sports and being a 'fan' cultivate communities of spectatorship.

Presents interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's characters as simple, antinomian, and non-psychological; and of his landscapes as unrelated to the violent arcs of often orphaned and socially detached characters. This book talks about how McCarthy's books only appear to be stories of masculine heroics, and expressions of misogynistic fear.

Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, this book focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge.

Reevaluates the achievement of James Merrill, by showing how he takes up an old paradigm - innocence - and reinvents it in response to new historical, scientific, and cultural developments including the bomb, contemporary cosmology, and the question of agency. The book covers Merrill's full career, emphasizing on his late poetry.

Thomas Pynchon's writing of postmodern fiction has been characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, and as a series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the "political" Pynchon disappears all too easily under the mantle of post modernity.

Explores some of the important literary and philosophical influences on WH Auden's poetry. This study attempts to show that Auden's poetry derives much of its interest from a range of authors' on whom he drew for inspiration. It also suggests that his relationship to these writers was marked by ambivalence.

Traces the uneasy relationship between the content of Keats' poems and social history. This book reveals that the early poems are linked with the mission statement of the radical journal "Annals of the Fine Arts", whilst the poems after "Endymion" reveal a poet more concerned with the nature of poetic representation, its why and wherefore.

Dickens was known for his imagination and fiery social protest. This book shows how Dickens used the fairy tale to express his political and social views, and helped establish it as an important literary genre for the Victorian public.

Takes a look at Ben Jonson's epigrams, prose, and verse satire in order to focus on Jonson's theatrical appropriations of London space both in and out of the playhouse. This book offers an analysis of the strategies of authorial definition that Jonson pursued throughout his career as a poet and playwright.

Examines a selection of G K Chesterton's novels, poetry, and literary criticism and outlines the distinctive philosophy of history that emerges from these writings. This book concludes that Chesterton's emphasis on locality is the hallmark of his historical philosophy in that it blends the concepts of free will, specificity, and creatureliness.

Undertakes a comprehensive linguistic and historical study of the plain style tradition in poetry, its relationship with so-called 'difficult' poetry, and its particular realization in the cultural and historical context of 20th-century Britain. The author examines the nature of poetry as a type of discourse.

Traces James's development of the modern novel, following a thread that leads from Romanticism and Literary Naturalism to French Impressionist theories of art, and culminates in a distinctly Jaemsian rendering of aestheticism.

Presents an account of Edith Wharton, viewing the author as a spatial activist and reassessing her place in American literature and culture. This book examines Wharton's theories of space in Newport and Rhode Island during the Gilded Age to illustrate the important role built-environment played in the social, economic and personal conflicts.

Examining several Dickens' texts, such as A Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, this book highlights Dickens' critical view of capitalism and his complex role within the system of nineteenth-century British financial capitalism.

Examines what JM Coetzee's novels portray as the circumstances that contribute to the humiliation of the individual - namely the abuse of language, master and slave interplay, aging and senseless waiting - and how these conditions can lead to the alienation and marginalization of the individual.

Considers the processes through which Emily Dickinson's work has been edited in the twentieth century and how such editorial processes contribute to the production of Dickinson as author. This work covers the posthumous editing of her handwritten manuscripts, and explores what a Dickinson poem may be, and how we may approach such an object.

Arguing that Raymond Carver merits consideration as a major American writer, this text reveals his pivotal role in American minimalist fiction. It contextualizes Carver's work in terms of the time and place of its construction and represention to reveal it as fiction that transcends the lower middle class North American relity that it documents.

Readers have long noted affinities and contrasts between Merrill and Yeats. This examination of the nature of this lifelong poetic relationship draws on both little-known material and an examination of Merrill's better-known writing to establish the ways in which Merrill contends with the older poet's haunting personality and poetic accomplishment.

Argues that Tennyson's war poems reflect image patterns of the Iliad and the Aeneid, and reinvigorate the heroic ethos that informs these and other ancient texts.