Books in the Studies in Major Literary Authors series

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.

Presenting a fresh interpretation of Shelley's thinking, this study establishes Shelley as working in the Epicurean tradition by exploring Lucretius' "De Rerum Naturaas."

Examines Hardy's representations of the road and how the archaeological and historical record inform his work. This book argues that the road as represented by Hardy provides a palimpsest that critiques the Victorian construction of social and sexual identities, existing as contested spaces that channel desire for middle-class assimilation.

William Dean Howells and the Ends of Realism helps us to see him as a writer very much aware of his limitations and of his enormous importance in the development of an American literary tradition.

Terry Baxter provides a means of understanding the positive responses of Frederick Douglass's white audiences and African American celebrities' roles as both objects of consumption and vehicles for social change.

Drawing on historical and cultural studies of Victorian Catholicism, along with Hopkins's writings, Muller shows how the melancholy trajectory of the Jesuit poet's career mimics the deflation of Catholic hopes during the second half of Victoria's reign.

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.

In this new and original study, the author explores the long neglected link between D.H. Lawrence and philosophical anarchism. Reading Lawrence within this context significantly enhances our understanding of his work as a whole.

Explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. The text locates the sources of Woolf's preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.

Presenting an overview of the ideological orientation of "Omeros" and a far-reaching critique of post-colonial theory, Callahan engages some of the most vexing problems of authenticity by reading Walcott's work alongside ancient Greek literature and culture.

This book introduces a matrilineage for modernism that traces a distinct women's poetic voice from the Brontes through Alice Meynell to modernists Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham.

Uses ecocriticism and feminist theory to locate Dorothy Wordsworth's important place in an ecocritical dialog, through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.

Argues that this previously banned author devoted his entire life to articulating a religion of self-liberation in his autobiographical books. This study shows how these transatlantic movements - gave him the hermeneutical devices, and the creative license, to interpret texts and symbols from mainline religions in an iconoclastic manner.

This book reads Hawthorne's fiction in the context of nineteenth-century medical and pseudomedical discourse that linked men of letters to debilitated invalids, a stereotype against which Hawthorne struggled throughout his career.

F. Scott Fitzgerald left behind a substantial body of work on New York. Informed by a skillful combination of literary criticism and cultural theory, this work provides an engaging and enlightening reading of these novels and stories.

Presents the book-length study of Jorie Graham, this book connects her work to the legacy of Eliot and Stevens in an effort to explain her recurring interest in the visual and compulsion to drastically reinvent her work as she goes along.

Explores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites: always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the other.

Considers how John Milton's later works demonstrate the intensive struggle of spiritual reading. This book rethinks the basic relationship between reading and religion in seventeenth-century England.

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.

Combining literary analysis with cultural criticism, this book highlights the aspect of our nation's iconic development in statuary. It investigates the connection between the contested nineteenth-century American monument tradition and one of the nation's most revered authors.

This work explores the way in which Henry James and Edith Wharton treated subject matter that was considered controversial by American publishers at the turn of the century and how they pursued 'discretion', in order to avoid censorship.

Exploring D H Lawrence's relationship to colonialism, this work shows how Lawrence's belief in different "spirits" belonging to the disparate places enables him to transcend the hierarchies between metropolis and colony, between civilized and "primitive" worlds.

A work on speech pragmatics and visual thinking. Exploring how perceptual biases are transformed in the language of the poems, it demonstrates how the cognitive sciences can ground a new biographical practice, drawing attention to such matters as the creative process and the ethics of understanding individuals who think differently.