Providing an overview of the history of the term and the different ways in which it is used, this book outlines the origins of elegy, and the characteristics of the genre. It examines the psychology and cultural background underlying works of mourning. It explores how the modern elegy has evolved, and how it differs from 'canonical elegy'.

This book offers scholars and students of literary, theatrical, and women's history the first full-length critical study of an important Renaissance genre. Country house entertainments, short plays staged for the Queen at country estates (1571-1602), enabled men and women to engage in crucial political and literary debates in Elizabethan England.

A new account of Elizabethan diplomacy with an original archival foundation, this book examines the world of letters underlying diplomacy and political administration by exploring a new material text never before studied in its own right: the diplomatic letter-book.

The writings of two influential Elizabethan thinkers testify to the influence of Old English law and literature on Tudor society and self-image.

This book argues that embryology and the reproductive sciences played a key role in the rise of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A fascinating look at the scientific benefits - and joys - of reading aloud to children of all ages.

Christopher Robin's story in his own words.

Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? That deceptively simple question is at the heart of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She re-examines the beginning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in nineteenth-century discourses: particularly discourses about women and gender.

A collection of traditional folk tales, including history, folklore and nature observations about the coasts and seas of England

The English Handbook: A Guide to Literary Studies is a comprehensive new textbook providing essential practical and analytical reading and writing skills for literature students at all levels. The Handbook features coverage of all key areas, from sonnets to irony to close textual analysis.

English Literature: A Very Short Introduction discusses why literature matters, how narrative works, and what is distinctly English about English literature. Jonathan Bate considers how we determine the content of the field, and looks at the three major kinds of imaginative literature - English poetry, English drama and The English novel.

The English Novel and Prose Narrative provides an astute, wide-ranging and accessible critical introduction to the English novel and short fiction, and explores the novel's relations to narrative forms such as biography and autobiography.

This selection of more than 600 epigrams in verse is the first major translation from the Greek Anthology in nearly a century. Each of the Anthology's books of epigrams is represented here, in manuscript order, and with extensive notes on the history and myth that lie behind them.

This is the innovative, trail-blazing enquiry into the importance, range, and history of the publishers' series in America and in Britain, by the leading expert in this field.

A thoroughly researched, balanced new biography of author, journalist and adventurer Ernest Hemingway.

The essential biography

ESSAYISM is a personal, critical and polemical book about the genre, its history and its contemporary possibilities, itself an example of what it describes: an essay that is curious and digressive and at the same time held together by a personal voice and a polemical point.

First published in 1993, this book brings together Muriel Spark's writings on the Bronte sisters, including a selection of their letters and a selection of Emily Bronte's poems.

After its publication in 1667, John Milton's Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit.