Details the discovery of The epic of Gilgamesh, and explores the broader tensions concerning history and time that it highlighted in Victorian culture -- .

Despite the warnings of critics and moral leaders, French novels were widespread in Victorian culture. How did Victorian readers gain access to them? How were the novels' supposed immorality debated and challenged? And how far did the influx of French novels raise questions and anxieties about the literary and commercial value of the English novel?

Offering a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lauren Gillingham contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for articulating a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that organizes contemporary life.

This study invites researchers of Romantic literature and literary and political culture to consider how this period's imaginings of the end of the world shaped thinking about politics and political change. Its highly original arguments on this current theme will interest students of political thought, affect theory, and ecocriticism.

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.

The way that characters in early modern theatrical performance think through their surroundings is important in our understanding of perception, memory, and other forms of embodied affective thought. This book explores this concept in dramatic works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Jonson.

This history of reading for Middle English poetry combines close readings, detailed case studies of surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period.

Michael Giffin offers a reading of Austen's six published novels against the background of a "long 18th century" that stretched from the Restoration to the Regency.

This study discusses those features of contemporary society which particularly influenced early modern crime reporting, such as attitudes to news, the law and women's rights, and ideas about the responsibility of the community for keeping order.

This book reappraises the place of children's literature, showing it to be a creative space where writers and illustrators try out new ideas about books, society, and narratives in an age of instant communication and multi-media. It looks at the stories about the world and young people; the interaction with changing childhoods and new technologies.

Munro explores the conscious use of archaic language by poets and dramatists including Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson and Milton.

Writers, Readers, and Reputations explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged. Writers were promoted as celebrities, advertising both products and themselves. Philip Waller's detailed and entertaining study is a collective biography of literary figures, some forgotten, some enduring, over half a century.

Authoring War illuminates the ingenious ways in which writers have met the challenge of conveying conflict, from the Iliad to Iraq.

This book focuses on Kenelm Digby's development of 'the oeconomy of nature' in the seventeenth century and how this concept influences the literature of Jonson, Marvell, Herbert, and Milton. It is for graduate students and researchers working in the field of early modern English literature and literature and the environment.

Mellor makes the persuasive argument that to understand Second World War British culture one must understand the ruined and fragmented cityscapes that it responds to. Of relevance to literary critics and cultural historians, and featuring famous and forgotten authors, this book makes modernism - and war literature - look vividly different.

Explores the ways poets address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in the First World War and beyond.

A wide-ranging and elegantly written study of how nineteenth-century culture thought about, and thought with, the idea of originality. It reveals how plagiarism was not only a theoretical concern of Victorian commentators on literature, but also provided a creative resource for many important writers including Eliot, Dickens, Pater, and Wilde.

What was a book in early modern England? Material Texts in Early Modern England focuses on neglected bibliographical cultures, including cutting, destruction, recycling, and errors. It explores how authors including Herbert, Milton, and Cavendish responded to this rich bibliographical context.

Discusses how literary culture in the Renaissance was fundamentally oral and studies a variety of literary soundscapes, from the schoolroom to the printing house, to explore why and how 'sound' was meaningful to Renaissance writers.

A study, in which, the 1920s emerge as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations. It offers a general account of Twenties literature in Britain.

This study covers the impact on Victorian Britain of the history and literature of Ancient Rome. It shows how scholars and poets, as well as engineers, soldiers, scientists and politicians, gained inspiration from the writing, theory and practice of their Roman predecessors.

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