'The Mona Lisa of literature' T. S. EliotIn Shakespeare's verbally dazzling and eternally enigmatic exploration of conscience, madness and the nature of humanity, a young prince meets his father's ghost in the middle of the night, who accuses his own brother - now married to his widow - of murdering him. The prince devises a scheme to test the truth of the ghost's accusation, feigning wild insanity while plotting revenge. But his actions soon begin to wreak havoc on innocent and gu...

It is widely supposed that the most suitable partner will be someone very much like oneself; gay fiction and cinema are often organized around this assumption. Nonetheless, power differentials are remarkably persistent—as well as sexy. What are the personal and political implications of this insight?Sinfield argues that hierarchies in interpersonal relations are continuous with the main power differentials of our social and political life (gender, class, age, and race); therefore i...

Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain is a landmark work in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. It offers a provocative and brilliant account of political change since 1945 and how such change shaped the cultural output of our time. It also looks at how and when literature intersects with other cultural forms - including jazz and rock music, television, journalism, commercial and "mass" cultures - and the growth of American cultural dominance. This edition i...

Luxurious Sexualities contains some of the most path- breaking adventurous critical writing currently to be found in Britain. Focusing on eighteenth century sexuality it is intriguing, controversial and provoking.Textual Practice contains articles relating to women, popular culture, visual media, and ethnic and sexual minorities.

Following a first edition that generated wide-spread debate, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading is a bold study of the future of critical theory and the role of gender, ethnicity and cultures within academic literary studies.An illuminating introduction to the second edition revisits the book's agenda for a new form of cultural critique and a truly political lesbian and gay studies. Sinfield renews his call for an 'Englit' that incorporates ongoing study of the cultures of ...

First published in 1977, this book looks at the versatile literary form of dramatic monologue. Although it is often associated with Browning and other poets writing between 1830 and 1930, the concept has been employed by diverse poets of multiple periods such as Ovid, Chaucer, Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. In this study, Alan Sinfield demonstrates and analyses the range and adaptability of the form through detailed examples. He shows that the technique maintains a...

From Angus Wilson to Pat Barker and Salman Rushdie, British Culture of the Post-War is an ideal starting point for those studying cultural developments in Britain of recent years. Chapters on individual people and art forms give a clear and concise overview of the progression of different genres. They also discuss the wider issues of Britain's relationship with America and Europe, and the idea of Britishness.Each section is introduced with a short discussion of the major hi...

First published in 1983, this book focuses on the twentieth-century writer as both a product, and an interpreter, of his or her society. It explores the social basis of our conceptions of literature and the ways in which writing is affected by the media, institutional and technical, through which it reaches readers. The text looks at experiences of the period in terms of domestic and world affairs, sexuality, and philosophical and religious attitudes. It discusses the social and economic s...

Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality is a powerful reassessment of cultural materialism as a way of understanding textuality, history and culture, by one of the founding figures of this critical movement. Alan Sinfield examines cultural materialism both as a body of ongoing argument and as it informs particular works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, especially in relation to sexuality in early-modern England and queer theory.The book has several interlocking preoccupati...

Volume 10, Issue 3- Papers include: Tragedy and the nationalist condition of criticism "Thomas Doucherty"--Descartes, Baudrillard, Dryden and a consideration of cultural relations between England and France in the late seventeenth century.ILaodamia and the moaning of Mary "John" "Barrell"--changing critical responses to Wordsworth's "heroic version of masculinity." Melodrama as Avant-garde: enacting a new subjectivity "Simon Shepherd"--nineteenth-century English radicals and translations o...

Since its launch in 1987 TP has been Britain's principal international journal of radical literary studies, continually pressing theory into new engagments.

Since its launch in 1987 TP has been Britain's principla international journal of radical literary studies, continually pressing theory into new engagements. Today, as customary relations among disciplines and media are questioned and transformed, TP works at the turning points of theory with politics, history and texts. It is intrigued by the processes through which hitherto marginal cultures of ethnicity and sexuality are becoming conceptually central, and by the consequences of these di...