Discusses the development of politics from the ancient world to the twentieth century. The author prompts the reader to consider why political systems evolve, how politics offers both power and order in the society, whether democracy is always a good thing, and what future politics may have in the twenty-first century.

Considered by many as one of the finest novels in the English language, The Portrait of a Lady is both a dramatic Victorian tale of betrayal and a wholly modern psychological study of a woman caught in machinations she only comes to understand too late. This new edition usefully tracks the major textual changes James made for his New York Edition.

One of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Young Irish Catholic, Stephen Dedalus, rejects religion and national ties to develop unfettered as an artist. Stronly autobiographical, the novel is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of Ulysses.

The first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English Portraiture which investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre.

Postmodernism has been a buzzword of contemporary society for the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this Very Short Introduction Christopher Butler challenges and explores the key ideas of postmodernists, and their engagement with theory, literature, the visual arts, film, architecture, and music.

A new study which considers the nature of gift-giving in early-modern England - looking at what gifts where, how they were offered and received, and what they meant politically under the different monarchs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.