The contributors to this volume attempt to fill the gap in critical consideration of women writers of the Beat Generation and evaluate their lives and literary output, helping the reader appreciate their unique, diverse voices during a dynamic moment of profound cultural change.

This updated edition has been thoroughly revised to take account of recent scholarship and includes five new chapters.

Writing a War of Words is the first investigation of a valuable archive of war-time notebooks documenting changes to the English language on the Home Front. Using unconventional sources, it explores the effect of war on the language of ordinary people, and reflects on the role of language as an interdisciplinary lens on history.

Harold Bloom was awarded the 1999 Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism by the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Robinson Crusoe is one of those extraordinary literary works whose importance lies not only in the text itself but in its persistently lively afterlife. This celebratory collection of tercentenary essays testifies to the book's endurance, analysing its literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural implications in historical context.

In this new guide, Chris Coles shows you how to approach the plays of these three major playwrights and how you can build your own critical response to their complex and demanding plays. If you are studying any of these three dramatists, then this is likely to prove the one critical book you will need.

This practical reference for university and senior high school students shows how to read, understand and analyze poetry. Included are sections on narrative poetry and writing essays.

This book provides a clear method of study which encourages students to construct their own interpretation of any of Dicken's novels. This in turn provides students with a way of identifying the distinctiveness of Dickens's fiction and with a way of structuring an intelligent critical response to any of his novels.

In this book Tony Curtis, himself an award-winning poet, offers clear and positive help to students who are faced by a modern poem which puzzles and frightens them.

Forster's novels have always given great pleasure to the general reader but they do present particular problems for those who wish to study them in a more systematic way.

This guide to James Joyce's major novels presents a refreshing approach to understanding the work of this challenging and enigmatic giant of twentieth-century literature. Taking the student through a careful, step-by-step analysis of each text, John Blades demonstrates a practical and lively method of critical analysis.

This thoroughly revised and expanded Second Edition has three new chapters taking this process one step further, showing how to make use of the new critical thinking that has swept through literary criticism in recent years.

However much students enjoy their reading of a Jane Austen novel, many find it difficult to know how to organise their critical responses.

In this fresh edition of his tried-and-tested guide, Rob Pope continues to help students get to grips with Chaucer - all the way through from the first tentative encounters with the language to sophisticated critical and historical engagement with Chaucer's narrative art in context.

Practical criticism underlies everything students of English literature do. This book is a practical, step-by-step guide which shows the student how to gain a sense of what a poem or passage of prose or drama is about, how to analyse it and how to build a successful essay.

Romantic poetry deals with the tensions, hopes and fears of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as felt by a disparate group of men and women. This revised and expanded second edition shows how to use some developments in literary theory to think and write about Romantic poetry.

An accessible and easy-to-use scholarly guide to the literature, concepts and debates of the turbulent Romantic era. Aimed at both the undergraduate student and more experienced readers who seek a compact yet comprehensive up-to-date account of the poetry, drama and novels that characterised the Romantic period.