Books in the Studies in Major Literary Authors series

Incorporating readings of Heaney's elegies, pastoral eclogues and sonnets, this book presents a formal analysis which comprises close readings of Seamus Heaney's poetry. By a detailed structural analysis of diction, meter, imagery and generic form, it considers the interplay between different kinds of literary tradition and community in poetry.

When H P Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined "a true Theosophist" in her book "The Key to Theosophy", she could have just as easily have been describing W B Yeats. This project examines the influence theosophy has on the literary work Yeats produced in the late 1880's and 1890's.

Arguing that Orwell's fiction and non-fiction weigh the benefits and costs of adopting a doubled perspective, this title illustrates how decency follows this perspective. It shows how Orwell's characters' ability to treat others decently depends upon the characters' relative capacities for doubleness.

This volume traces the presence of the theatre, both literally and metaphorically, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens.

Shows that education constitutes the central metaphor of John Milton's political as well as his poetic writing. Demonstrating how Milton's theory of education emerged from his own practices as a reader and teacher, this book analyzes the relationship between Milton's own material habits as a reader and his theory of the power of books.

Arguing that gender and difference are conceptual and performative, Schneider examines many of Conrad's best-known fictions to show how his use of female allegorical imagery, oppositional narrative strategies and hybrid generic structures challenge late-Victorian ideologic norms and goals.

This book examines the often tragic and nearly always disabling metaphor of the theatrum mundi world-as-stage, as it plays itself out in the characters of Mary Shelley's novels.

Looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes' writing. This work explores the editorial changes that T S Eliot made to the manuscript of "Nightwood", as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman.

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.

Re-reading Leaves of Grass within the context of a nineteenth-century evangelical culture of conversion, this book uncovers how the sacred seductions of Whitman's poetry sought to redeem the nation through the ecstatic conversions of its readers.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries.

Offers a cultural history of Stein's rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining the ways the popular portrayed Stein in her work, this book shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were well-known.

Studying on the subject of Dickens and work, this book argues that, rather than engaging with work as an abstract, quasi-religious and entirely benign value, Dickens' writings demonstrate the varied ways in which it shapes gender identity and personality.

Examines the representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Joseph Conrad's fiction. This book traces Conrad's representations of homosexuality and homoeroticism, beginning with the Malay works and ending with "The Shadow Line".

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.

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.

An overview of McCarthy's published work and includes: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script. This book locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America's vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. It also outlines his personal background.

Presents an ecocritical reading of DeLillo's novels in an attempt to mediate between the seemingly incompatible influences of postmodernism and environmentalism. This title argues that although DeLillo is responding to and engaging with a postmodern culture of simulacra, his novels do not reflect a postmodernist theory of the "end of nature."

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.

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.

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.