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142 results in Writers and their Work

Page 2 of 8

Robert Burns
  • Gerard Carruthers
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 December 2010
  • This book treats Burns' work from the first publication of his poetry in 178 to his song writing and collecting which predominated in the 1790s. It encompasses discussion of Burns' social and religious satires, his political comment and his utterances on love and gender. In line with modern Burns scholarship, this study reads Burns' against both his Scottish and British literary backgrounds and emphasises, particularly, Burns' construction of his poetic persona. As a key element of this latter aspect, the treatment considers Burns against his poetic space for himself as a Scot makes him a crucial Enlightenment and proto-Romantic figure. The book debunks the myth of Burns as "this heaven-taught ploughman", emphasising his very contemporary understanding of the power of literature, and of the emotions as a vital part of human intellect.

Sidney and His Circle
  • Matthew Woodcock
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 May 2010
  • This book provides a structured introduction to the life and works of Sir Philip Sidney, and includes a chapter on Sidney's closest literary peers and imitators.

Walter Pater

Sylvia Plath
  • Elisabeth Bronfen
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • In this new edition of her engaging and original study Elisabeth Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath's poetry, her novel The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction as well as her autobiographical texts, in the context of the resilient Plath-Legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963 and to which, after over three decades of silence. Ted Hughes responded with his collection of commemorative poems, Birthday letters. Arguing that although we can not sever our reading of Plath's work from the critical and biographical writings about her, the study nevertheless offers close readings of texts to explore the various self-fashionings in poetry and prose. Which this highly ambivalent poet developed. The central theme to which this study returns is Plath's insistence on a clandestine traumatic knowledge of fallibility and fragility underlying the fiction of success, health and happiness so prevalent in post-World War Two, whether expressed as anger and violence, as the celebration of feminine figures of transcendence, or as the quiet dissolution of the subject and its world represented in her late Ariel poems; whether giving voice to the relentless self-absorption of her autobiographical texts or psychic recovery in her autobiographical novel, Plath's struggle with gender and cultural identity is astonishingly timely.

Richard III
  • Edward Burns
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2006
  • Richard III has the status of a monster, in British culture, and the continuous popularity of Shakespeare's play has done much to foster this. Deformity and distortion operate through this myth on many levels. This study is an essay in five "distortions", tracking the way the play manipulates and explores fundamental human concerns; the body, history, theatre, childhood and family and the mirrors and shadows of individual identity and self-knowledge.

Women's Gothic
  • From Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley
  • E. J. Clery
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2004
  • Female writers of the Gothic were hell-raisers in more than one sense: not only did they specialize in evoking scenes of horror, cruelty, and supernaturalism, but in doing so they exploded the literary conventions of the day, and laid claim to realms of the imagination hitherto reserved for men. They were rewarded with popular success, large profits, and even critical adulation. E.J. Clery's acclaimed study tells the strange but true story of women's gothic. She identifies contemporary fascination with the operation of the passions and the example of the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons as enabling factors, and then examines in depth the careers of two pioneers of the genre, Clara Reeve and Sophie Lee, its reigning queen, Ann Radcliffe, and the daring experimentalists Joanna Baillie and Charlotte Dacre. The account culminates with Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein (1818) has attained mythical status. Students and scholars as well as general readers will find Women's Gothic a stimulating introduction to an important literary mode.

William Hazlitt
  • R. L. Brett, J. B. Priestley, Michael Foot
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2020
    Print publication:
    10 January 1994
  • William Hazlitt was a brilliant and perceptive essayist and critic in the early 19th Century whose critical impressions of his contemporaries and their work gave a sense of an age and the leading figures who populated it in a particularly vivid way.

James Kelman
  • H. Gustav Klaus
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 August 2004
  • One of the most powerful and provocative writers to have emerged in Britain in recent years, James Kelman has engendered a good deal of controversy over his widely reported, but often misconceived use of 'bad' language words. This introduction to the whole range of his works, from the early short stories through the plays and essays to the Booker Prize winning novel How Late it Was, How Late and the latest experimental fiction, examines the embattled Kelman’s literary politics. H. Gustav Klaus pays close attention to the Scottish culture in which Kelman's writing was nurtured, to the uncompromising treatment of the 'underclass', the intricacies of the narrative voice and the existentialist anguish behind it. A writer of international reputation now, Kelman's principled anti-authoritarianism raises uncomfortable questions about the continuing reality of class, dominant social and literary values and the role of writers in our time.

William Shakespeare
  • Measure for Measure
  • Kate Chedgzoy
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2020
    Print publication:
    06 January 2000
  • This study explores the intertwining of politics, sexuality, and the social order in Measure for Measure.

John Dryden
  • David Hopkins
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2004
  • This book is a concise introduction, drawing on the latest research, to the life and work of the most celebrated English poet of the late seventeenth century. It is unusual in stressing not only the poet's responses to events, personalities, and ideas of his day, but also the way in which his work engages (in a far more speculative and pluralistic way than is often supposed) with human issues and dilemmas of permanent concern: the relation of human to animal and inanimate nature; the forces, internal and external which serve to ennoble, enrich and confound human endeavour; the capacities and limits of human reason; the relations between the sexes. Dryden emerges from this study as, simultaneously, 'a man of his times' and a writer with important things to say to us all.

Janet Frame

Ted Hughes
  • Susan Bassnett
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 February 2009
  • Hughes is seen as a complex, multi-faceted writer, a great poet in the tradition of English nature poetry, who also sought inspiration from international sources, ancient and modern. His lifelong concern for language and his use of mythology and history are explored, while his poetic achievements are examined in context, together with his writing for children and his experiments with forms of theatre.

John Keats
  • Kelvin Everest
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2002
  • This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats's major poems and letters, from a perspective which aims to counter the historical emphasis of recent critical work

John Bunyan
  • Tamsin Spargo
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 January 2004
  • John Bunyan (1628-88) lived and wrote through some of the most turbulent years of political, social, and religious change in British history from civil war, through Commonwealth and Protectorate to the Restoration. Imprisoned for unlicensed preaching as a Nonconformist, Bunyan turned to writing to sustain his pastoral mission and composed some of the best-known, and most critically acclaimed, seventeenth-century texts, from his intensely moving spiritual autobiography, Grace bounding to the Chief of Sinners, to the world famous allegory The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's style fused vivid depiction of the everyday world of ordinary men and women with powerful narratives to dramatise his religious convictions. This accessible study of his life, times, and writing introduces all his key works within the contexts of their original moment and later international impact and argues that Bunyan is a writer whose work continues to reward readers of all ages, beliefs, and nationalities.

Vladimir Nabokov
  • Neil Cornwell
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    05 January 1999
  • Neil Cornwell's centennial study provides an up-to-date critical survey of Nabokov's main novels and shorter fiction.

Katherine Mansfield
  • Andrew Bennett
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    29 February 2004
  • This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories focusing on the question of the connection between life and writing in her work. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks. The study focuses on the question of the connection between life and writing in Mansfield's work: it explores her engagements with issues of personal identity and elaborates her theory and practice of a poetics of impersonation whereby the identity of the author is merged with those of her characters. Bennett argues that Mansfield's multiple and unstable identities and identifications are bound up with issues of colonialism, nationality, gender, and sexuality, and that they may be said to be embedded within the very texture of her prose. Mansfield's impersonations, in their engagement with a 'queer' aesthetics, with strangeness and surprise, with hatred, with an unsettling of personal identity and with the uncertainties of national and sexual identification, constitute the risk and the achievement of Katherine Mansfield's writing.

Tony Harrison
  • Joe Kelleher
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 1996
  • Tony Harrison is one of the most popular and respected poets and verse writers for the stage working in Britain today. In his lucid critical study Joe Kelleher brings Harrison's diverse output together under coherent themes, from his early published verse The Loiners (1970), to his accomplished translation and adaptation of The Oresteia (1981), through to his recent work for stage and television including The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995). He pays particular critical and theoretical attention to the issues of autobiography, translation, testimony and remembrance, and to poetry's obligation to face up - publicly - to the 'worst things' of twentieth-century history. Joe Kelleher's book considers Harrison's work as that of a dramatic poet, in the widest sense, staging personal utterance upon the landscape of public concerns.

Jean Rhys
  • Helen Carr
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 October 2012
  • Neglected and forgotten for many years, the arresting, elliptical novels written by Dominican-born Jean Rhys are now widely acclaimed. Her last and most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, her retelling of Jane Eyre, is a central text for the imaginative re-examination of gender and colonial power relations. Helen Carr's account draws on both recent feminism and postcolonial theory, and places Rhys's work in relation to modernist and postmodernist writing. First published in 1996, Helen Carr's revised edition takes full cognizance of the wide critical attention paid to Rhys since that date.

Veronica Forrest-Thompson and Language Poetry
  • Alison Mark
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    01 June 2001
  • Veronica Forrest-Thomson was an innovative poet and literary theorist, whose work is only now beginning to attract the attention it merits. Her aesthetic is founded on engagements with the criticism of William Empson and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and develops through an early assimilation of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, including the seminal work of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. In her referentially rich poetry, Forrest-Thomson engages with the full range and history of poetry in English in her explorations of three themes: identity, the nature of experience, and the representation of both British and American contemporary poets, including those usually known as the language poets: North American writers who, since the 1970's, have explored a related poetics. This study provides the first sustained consideration of Forrest-Thomson's poetry, and of the relationships between her work and that of the language writers. It all culminates in an overview of the project of Language writing and its important contribution to contemporary 'avant-garde', and shows that Forrest-Thomson's body of work, both poetry and poetics, deserves to be considered as one of the most remarkable achievements of the late twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf
  • Laura Marcus
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    09 January 2020
    Print publication:
    30 April 2004
  • In the new edition of her highly regarded study, Laura Marcus examines a wide range of Virginia Woolf's novels, short stories, essays and autobiographical writings in the context of themes and topics of central contemporary relevance and interest: time, history and narrative; modernism and the city; gender, sexuality and identity; art and life-writings. As well as exploring her significance for, and contribution to, feminist debates and to definitions of modernism, the book also includes detailed analyses of all Woolf's novels an her non-fiction writings, including 'A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas and the 'biography' Flush. It considers current theoretical approaches to Woolf's work and also engages with Woolf's own cultural contexts, exploring, for example, her responses to war, to Freud's theories, and to early twentieth-century theories of sexuality and gender identity, and the transition from Victorianism to modernity.

Page 2 of 8