This Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive guide yet both to the nature and content of literature, and to literary criticism. In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars, the volume covers both traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and also newer topics such as the production and reception of literature. Current critical ideas are clearly and provocatively discussed, while the volume's arrangement reflects in a dynamic ...

This unique collection of lectures honors the pioneering work in Byron studies of Leslie Alexis Marchand, who has had an enduring influence on the appreciation and study of Lord Byron for sixty years. Generations of readers and writers have come to Byron through his biographies and his edition of the poet’s letters and journals. All admirers of Byron respond to the verve, dash, and immediacy of his correspondence, which lies at the heart of Marchand’s biographies and offers us a portrait b...

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today.Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this...

While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth and Thomas Love Peacock. Over the last generation, especially, a remarkable range of popular works from the period have been re-discovered and reread intensively. This Com...

More than any other period of British literature, Romanticism is strongly identified with a single genre. Romantic poetry has been one of the most enduring, best loved, most widely read and most frequently studied genres for two centuries and remains no less so today. This Companion offers a comprehensive overview and interpretation of the poetry of the period in its literary and historical contexts. The essays consider its metrical, formal, and linguistic features; its relation to history...

Beginning theory has been helping students navigate through the thickets of literary and cultural theory for over two decades. This new and expanded fourth edition continues to offer readers the best single-volume introduction to the field. The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unravelled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Beginning theory allows rea...

Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy is the most thorough and detailed life of Marlowe since John Bakeless's in 1942. It has new material on Marlowe in relation to Canterbury, also on his home life, schooling, and six and a half years at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and includes fresh data on his reading, teachers, and early achievements, including a new letter with a new date for the famous 'putative portrait' of Marlowe at Cambridge. The biography uses for the first time the La...

What is Romanticism? In this Very Short Introduction Michael Ferber answers this by considering who the romantics were and looks at what they had in common -- their ideas, beliefs, commitments, and tastes. He looks at the birth and growth of Romanticism throughout Europe and the Americas, and examines various types of Romantic literature, music, painting, religion, and philosophy. Focusing on topics, Ferber looks at the 'Sensibility' movement, which preceded Romanticism; ...

Fifty Key Texts in Art History is an anthology of critical commentaries selected from the classical period to the late modern. It explores some of the central and emerging themes, issues and debates within Art History as an increasingly expansive and globalised discipline. It features an international range of contributors , including art historians, artists, curators and gallerists.Arranged chronologically, each entry includes a bibliography for further reading and a key ...

The 700-year history of the novel in English defies straightforward telling. Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography,...

A twenty-first century version of Roger Fowler’s 1973 Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms, this latest edition of The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms is the most up-to-date guide to critical and theoretical concepts available to students of literature at all levels.With over forty newly commissioned entries, this essential reference book includes:an exhaustive range of entries, covering such topics as genre, form, cultural theory and ...

As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic w...