Examines Milton's thinking about matter and substance throughout his entire poetic career, seeks to alter the prevailing critical view that Milton was a monist-materialist - one who believes that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.
An amazing guide to some of the most beloved, original, inspiring, hysterical, heart-warming, compelling, rude and downright scary books that have enchanted children the world over.
Want to become a science fiction buff? Want to expand your reading in your favourite genre? This is a good place to start! From the publishers of the popular Good Reading Guide comes a rich selection of some of the finest SF novels ever published.
What makes a great play? Does the definition change with time and circumstance? Are certain common factors visible down the ages? This book answers these questions.
Marking the forthcoming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, this book offers a intimate portrait of one of Shakespeare's most inspired moments: the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
In 2012-2013, a year-long conversation between writers took place at 17 literary festivals around the world, from Jaipur to Krasnoyarsk, and from Melbourne to Berlin. This book provides an international perspective on the issues facing writers and writing in general, and the present-day novel in particular.
Over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems...Welcome to the incredible archive of Douglas Adams.
Modern poetry is often represented as difficult or remote from most people's experience. This is a passionate attempt to introduce and examine all aspects of contemporary poetry and make it a familiar part of our lives.
In this insightful memoir Lennie Goodings takes the reader behind the scenes at Virago, the feminist press that she has led for twenty years. Moving from Virago's early days of independence, through its various commercial incarnations, the author reflects on idealistic publishing and how it feels to be a beacon for change.
This is a book of book lists. From Bin Laden's bookshelf to the books most frequently left in hotels, from prisoners' favourite books to MPs' most borrowed books, these lists are proof that a person's bookcase tells you everything you need to know about them, and sometimes more besides.
The captivating true story of an underdog business - a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher's Britain - from a woman at the heart of the women's liberation movement. An Independent and Stylist Best Non-Fiction Book for 2024
A searing account of our failure to look after the nation's most vulnerable citizens, and a call to arms to all of us to protect the innocence of childhood.
A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today.
The long-awaited biography of the mercurial, troubled, brilliant poet James Schuyler, the Pulitzer Prize winner who helped shape the New York School of poetry in the 1960s.
A History of English Autobiography explores the genealogy of autobiographical writing in England from the medieval period to the digital era. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History is the definitive, single-volume collection on English autobiography and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.
She writes beyond the time we live in.' Colum McCann Struggling to cope with urban life - and with life in general - Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on 'turbine hill' that has been vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier.
From Boccaccio and Machiavelli through to Moravia and Tabucchi, from the Stil Novo to Divisionism, across centuries of history and intellectual movements, these essays will give English readers, and lovers of the Bel Paese and its culture, the lay of the literary land of Italy.
Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life.
Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This title deals with the two artists, who at the height of their powers, answer their needs to document human struggle.
First ever critical study of Tolkien's little-known essay, which reveals how language invention shaped the creation of Middle-earth and beyond, to George R R Martin's Game of Thrones.
The sixth volume of Maya Angelou's bestselling autobiography is reissued in a new look to coincide with its induction to the Virago Modern Classics list.
From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo, a literary masterclass on how to become both a better writer and reader, on what makes great stories work, and what they can tell us about how to live
The School of Life has put together an ideal library that can speak helpfully to our individual needs and longings. Ranging across history and drawing on world literature, offering the same essential thing: true friends through the complex places of life with kindness and wisdom.
From 1892, when he was eighteen, until 1949, when this book was first published, Somerset Maugham kept a notebook. It is without doubt one of his most important works. Part autobiographical, part confessional, packed with observations, confidences, experiments and jottings it is a rich and exhilarating admission into this great writer's workshop
The first essay collection from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. 'This trenchant, unrepentant collection reminds you that she's a brilliant writer... Order a copy in case she's cancelled by Christmas' THE TIMES (Book of the Year)
This edited collection explores the afterlife of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in theatre and film, radio, literature and graphics novels, making a substantial contribution to the field of adaptation studies. -- .
The story of Diana Athill's relationship with Didi - a gifted writer and an Egyptian in exile - and a remarkably honest, poignant look at love and grief.
The flexibility of critical realism is illustrated in the range of topics discussed - ranging from quantum mechanics to cyberspace, to literary theory, nature, smoking, the future of Marx, the unconscious and, of course, postmodernism and the future of theory itself.
In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude.
Accompanying the British Library's major autumn exhibition and in collaboration with Agatha Christie Limited and the Agatha Christie Archive, this book uncovers the life and works of the 'Queen of Crime' as never before.
From the very first book publication in 1920 to the film release of Death on the Nile in December 2020, this investigation into Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world's favourite fictional detective.
King lays bare the background to Moby-Dick by moving through the voyage of the Pequod, exploring topics in marine biology, oceanography, and the science of navigation as Ishmael raises them in the novel.
One of France's most high-profile writers and a Nobel Prize-winner, Albert Camus experienced both public adulation and acrimonious rejection during his career, which was cut short by a fatal car accident in 1960. Edward J. Hughes unravels the life of a complex personality whose work and stance were the subjects of intense interest and scrutiny.
More than a decade on from the publication of the Sunday Times bestselling JUST MY TYPE, Simon Garfield presents a new series of beautifully designed pocket biographies of iconic typefaces
Highly original and magnificent in scope, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination discovers the roots of English cultural history in the Anglo-Saxon period, and traces it through the centuries.
This is the first book to tell the story of the Romantic album and its original poetry. It rediscovers a huge number of overlooked Romantic poems, and reconstructs how albums and their owners were represented in print
The fifth volume in Maya Angelou's bestselling autobiography is reissued in a new look to mark its induction to the Virago Modern Classics list, alongside several of the author's most celebrated works.
'All men must die': or 'Valar Morghulis', as the traditional Essos greeting is rendered into High Valyrian. And die they do - in prodigious numbers; in imaginatively varied and gruesome ways; and often in pain, terror and ordure within the blood-spattered and viciously unpredictable world that is HBO's sensational evocation of Game of Thrones.
An urgent and profound excavation of the self, Holly Dawson's All of Us Atoms is a stunning memoir of the moments of becoming that form a life, heralding the arrival of a major new literary voice
From one of the most talented young thinkers in the US, a spiky, funny and intellectually dazzling response to modern culture - from sadomasochism to mindfulness to Sally Rooney
This introduction to American literature and culture from 1900 to 1960 is organized around four major ideas about America: that is it "big", "new", "rich", and "free". * Illustrates the artistic and social climate in the USA during this period.
The only autobiography by a major Victorian novelist, Trollope's account offers a fascinating insight into his literary life and opinions. This edition shows how he exaggerated to create his compelling narrative, and includes other writings to show how subtle and complex his approach to literature really was.
First translation into English of an extraordinary document that lays bare the jealousies felt but rarely expressed by writers, and an eternal monument to literary paranoia.
The ancient Greeks' concept of "the hero" was very different from what we understand by the term today. In 24 installments, based on the Harvard course Nagy has taught and refined since the 1970s, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores civilization's roots in Classical literature-a lineage that continues to challenge and inspire us.
Animal Satire presents a cultural history of animal satire, a critically neglected but persistent presence in the history of cultural production, in which animals expose human folly while the strategies of satire expose the folly of human-animal relations.
The notion of thinking as an outside, and the critical distance which this entails, is a key to an understanding of Desai as writer, and a recurrent theme for the discussions of her novels and short stories in her book.
An exploration of the life, work, and historical background of Aphra Behn: seventeenth-century dramatist, poet, novelist, political propagandist, bisexual and spy.
Since 1965 Geoffrey Shepherd's edition of Philip Sidney's "Apology" has been the standard, and this revision, with a new introduction and extensive notes, is designed to introduce the soldier-poet's work to a new generation of readers at the beginning of the 21st century.
With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists. The book will be published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.
Offers the first book-length, English-language examination of three adaptations of Greek tragedy produced by the gay and Marxist Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Archaic Modernism makes the case that these three films are as essential as those Pasolini films more often studied in the Anglophone world.
Argues that cultural politics - specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts - played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II.
John Milton was celebrated and denounced in his own time both as a poet and as a polemicist. This edition of Milton's major prose works includes: Of Education, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and the Divorce tracts, as well as the famous 1644 polemical tract on the opposing licensing and censorship, Areopagitica.
An exploration of the intricacies of narrative theory. Considering a range of texts from Western literature over the past two centuries, Miller explores the way rhetorical devices and figurative language interrupt, break into, delay and expand storytelling.
Derek Johns was Jan Morris's literary agent for twenty years, and Ariel is a literary life, an appreciation of the work and achievements of someone who besides being a delightful writer is known to many as a generous, affectionate, witty and irreverent friend.
The first volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. The second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography is The Invisible Writing.
In seven independent, but closely related chapters, the author presents his personal conception of the European novel, which he describes as 'an art born of the laughter of God'.
All the books published by a certain publisher could be seen as links in a single chain. In this book, the author meditates on the art of book publishing. It looks at the publishing industry as a whole, from the essential importance of graphics, jackets and cover flaps to the consequences of universal digitization.
How did the historical figure of King Arthur and his totally fictitious knights come to inspire so many stories? And why does Arthurian myth continue to flourish in films today? This introduction takes readers on a quest through the history of Arthurian romance in order to find the answers.
Locations from film, tv, literature, myths, comics and video games are plotted in a series of beautiful vintage-looking maps with fascinating stories of how authors and writers picked these places.
Atlas of Paranormal Places is a global tour of more than 50 locations with mystic, unexplained and ghostly significance. With a foreword by Danny Robins.
What is an 'author'? This volume investigates the changing definitions of the author, what it has meant historically to be an 'author', and the impact that this has had on literary culture.
A fascinating account of the emergence of the writer's house museum over the course of the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. It considers the museum as a cultural form and asks why it appeared and how it has constructed authorial afterlife for readers individually and collectively.
This work explores the significance of the genre of autobiography. Drawing on a range of writings, both literary and theoretical the text shows how biography and autobiography have been crucial in debates over subject and object, public and private - debates now figured in feminist theory.
If every writer necessarily draws on their own life, is any writing outside the realm of 'autobiography'? This guide includes developments in autobiographical criticism, highlighting major theoretical issues and concepts different forms of the genre. It offers an introduction to the study of a fascinating genre.
J. S. Mill was the greatest British philosopher of the nineteenth century. Mill's purpose in writing his Autobiography was to set down his own struggle for individuality, and vindicate his life to himself and others.
This book brings together great writing by figures from South Asia who give voice to the experience of the exile and the emigrant. The list of contributors also includes Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Meera Syal, and others.
Author and illustrator Edward Carey presents a paean to connection at a time of isolation: a year of daily lockdown drawings posted on social media from his home in Texas.
Contributors with a wide range of interests assess Mikhail Bakhtin's contribution to issues of colonialism, feminism, reception theory and theories of the body. This second edition takes advatage of new material on Bakhtin available after perestroika.
This book is a collection of essays on the most important figures associated with the Bakhtin Circle. It offers new biographical material, valuable translations of important Russian texts, a timeline and extensive bibliographical references.
This biography of Barbara Comyns presents a twentieth-century author whose life was as extraordinary as her novels. Hundreds of unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose complicated life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society. -- .
This biography of Barbara Comyns presents a twentieth-century author whose life was as extraordinary as her novels. Hundreds of unpublished letters reveal an occasionally desperate but resourceful and witty woman whose complicated life ranged from enduring poverty when young to mixing with spivs, spies and high society. -- .
Basic Elements of Narrative outlines a way of thinking about what narrative is and how to identify its basic elements across various media, introducing key concepts developed by previous theorists and contributing original ideas to the growing body of scholarship on stories.
More than a decade on from the publication of the Sunday Times bestselling JUST MY TYPE, Simon Garfield presents a new series of beautifully designed pocket biographies of iconic typefaces
This absorbing guide introduces the work of 'the Beats', assessing the lives which inspired their semi-autobiographical writing, and examining their monumental influence upon modern popular culture.
In Search of the Beats: Were they angel-headed hipsters, dope smoking dropouts or the most exciting group of writers in postwar American literature? Their stories of drugs, sex and the search for an alternative to 'squaresville' have cornered the market in cult literature, remaining hip even while being taught on university courses and...
During the nineteenth century, women authors for the first time achieved professional status, secure income, and public fame. This book examines the various ways women writers negotiated the market realities of authorship, and looks at the myths and models women writers constructed to elevate their place in the profession.
This text is designed to introduce students not only to ethnic American writers, but also to the cultural contexts and literary traditions in which their work is situated, with sections on African American, Asian American, Chicano/a and native American literature.
This second edition of Beginning postmodernism offers clear, accessible and step-by-step introductions to postmodernism across a wide range of subjects.
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 unravell
A beautiful new edition of Edward Said's classic which argues that a beginning is different from (and preferable to) an origin, because a beginning can be chosen and an origin can only be acknowledged
Aristocrat, literary celebrity, 'Rose Queen', devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography.
The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and that are very often long. There are also interviews that are very long. Focusing on writers and books they like, The Believer gives people and books the benefit of the doubt. The working title of this magazine was The Optimist.
Intends to introduce readers to the best work in the world of art, culture, and thought - whether that means literature, painting, wrestling, philosophy, or cooking - in an attractive vehicle that's free from the bugbears of condescension, mustiness, and jargony obfuscation.
Intends to introduce readers to the best and most interesting work in the world of art, culture, and thought - whether that means literature, painting, wrestling, philosophy, or cooking.
Features long articles, interviews, and book reviews, as well as poems, comics, and a two-page vertically-oriented Schema spread, more or less unreproduceable on the web. This title gives people and books the benefit of the doubt.
A monthly magazine where length is no object. It features long articles, interviews, and book reviews, as well as poems, comics, and a two-page vertically-oriented Schema spread, more or less unreproduceable on the web.
This delightful anthology rounds up the most memorable walker-writers, from country hikers to urban strollers, from the rationalists to the truly outlandish. All of them analyse our need to put one foot in front of the other. Follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, George Sand, Rebecca Solnit, Will Self, and dozens more.
Beowulf & Other Stories was first conceived in the belief that the study of Old English - and its close cousins, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman - can be a genuine delight, covering a period as replete with wonder, creativity and magic as any other in literature.
A study of metafiction - fiction in which an important theme is its own fictional status - in Soviet literature. It questions previous treatments of metafiction and suggests a framework for new approaches to Soviet literary history.
A guide that explains and celebrates various parallel poetry projects. It examines the range of contemporary tendencies - from the baroque swagger of the Dandies to the restrained elegance of the Oxford Elegists; from the layered, haunting verse of Mythopoesis to the inventive explorations of the New Formalists.
In this warm and witty celebration of the written word, the popular comedian and presenter takes the reader on a journey across Britain as he explores his lifelong love of books and bookshops.
In this warm and witty celebration of the written word, the popular comedian and presenter takes the reader on a journey across Britain as he explores his lifelong love of books and bookshops.
An exploration of children's literature - from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan to Young Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe - and the lessons these stories teach about the world around them.
Everywhere he looks he finds fragments and gaps: disconnected typescripts, bones and husks, boxes of marbles, collections of photographs. Like a shaman flying across the globe, his mind tracks the journeys of his subjects to the deserts of Africa and the maelstroms of the Arctic, where the shapes of myth meet the patterns of science.
Thalia Field's third book with New Directions is a tour de force of blending literary genres (poetry, prose, essay, and drama) and examining our control of the natural world.
A travel literature classic. Introduced by Geoff Dyer: 'As a book about Yugoslavia it's a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating'
A protean meter, blank verse lends itself to lyric, dramatic, narrative, and meditative modes; to epigram as well as to epic. This book offers a study of the meter's technical features and its history, as well as its many uses. It also includes advice for poets of our own day who may wish to attempt the form or enhance their mastery of it.
This Sourcebook examines Dickens' novel within its literary and cultural contexts providing an ideal orientation in the novel, its reception history and the critical material which surrounds it.
Angelou's autobiographical modern masterpiece receives the "Bloom's Notes" treatment, as the noted critic examines its place in 20th century literature. "Cliff Notes" they are not", says "Booklist".
Shortly before his death, S. P. Rosenbaum began work on the history of the Bloomsbury Group's 'Memoir Club'. With original archival material and valuable insights on leading Bloomsbury figures such as Woolf, Keynes and Forster, this illuminating book offers a new perspective on our understanding of twentieth-century autobiography and life writing.
Describing his childhood, Anglo-Catholic education and painful apprenticeship to the trade of dramatist, the author sets the progress of his own life against the history of a time in which faith in hierarchy, deference, religion, the empire and finally politics all withered away.
Takes you through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen, and Andy Warhol. In this book, the narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue.
For over 150 years, the garrets, pubs and clubs of Soho have been, according to Jeffrey Bernard, 'a lifeboat of sorts for the deserters from convention'. This book celebrates those whose style, irregular work patterns, love of intoxicants and unconventional sexual mores shaped the city, and the world, we know today.
Why do women join book clubs? What do the women discuss when they meet? to answer questions like these, Long spent years observing and participating in women's book clubs in the Houston area. She discovered that members find reading a crucial way for them to reflect on their lives.
Featuring some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, this is a lively and engaging introduction to the history and development of bookish maledictions.
Immerse yourself in a land full of literary locations in this tour through the great books of the British Isles. Caroline Taggart's guide to statues, walks both rural and urban, literary homes and vistas which inspired great scenes from our favourite novels is guaranteed to have something for every avid reader.
A literary quiz book with a difference, mirroring the format of the lively and popular quizzes Gary runs in the Betsey Trotwood pub in London and elsewhere. The book includes a lot of multiple-choice questions, some amusing answers, clever red herrings, little-known facts about authors and some much-loved Say What You See picture rounds.
A bold and imaginative volume on the constituent elements of the Book, from the pre-print era through to the digital. The twenty-two chapters written by an international team delve into all elements of the book from title pages to endpapers, from dust jackets to indices, and everything else in between.
This book presents and explores a challenging new approach in book history. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in the field of early modern book history as well as in a range of other disciplines.