Rosemarie Morgan provides a challenging reading arguing that, contrary to the accepted critical view, Hardy's heroines do seek control over their conduct and their destinies and this reveals itself in rebellious sexuality.

Thomas Middleton's intense study of betrayal, corruption, lust and violence, "Women Beware Women", is one of the revenge tragedies most commonly studied and performed. This guide offers an introduction to its critical and performance history, including notable stage productions, TV, audio and film versions and dramatic and text adaptations.

Travel writing of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was staple fare in an age of imperial expansion that was also the formative period of modern aesthetics. Elizabeth Bohls examines the ways in which women's travel writing of this period both drew on and challenged the conventions of aesthetic theory.

Discussing the role of women writers working in family groups during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries, this study explores the development of familial discourse within a chronological frame, commencing with the More family and concluding with the Cavendish group. It also explores how it enabled women to participate in literary production.

Reassesses women's relationship to performance in early modern England.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

This collection examines Gothic fiction written by female authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Analysing works by lesser known authors within a historical context, the collection offers a fresh perspective on women writers and their contributions to Gothic literature.

The first autobiography written by a British black woman.

Wonderworks reveals that literature is among the mightiest technologies that humans have ever invented, precision-honed to give us what our brains most want and need.

It looks at how artists have responded to two great, contrasting works, Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress; A brief coda turns to a fourth relationship: writers and artists who collaborate from the start, like Dickens and Phiz, and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.

The Work of Literature presents a fresh approach to the question of the value of literature, posing and responding to questions about the way we read and write about literature, its value to individuals and society, how it is best approached by readers and critics, and how it retains its power to give pleasure over decades and centuries.

The arresting poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins arises from philosophical engagement with the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other mysteries of Christian revelation. With explications of more than 29 of Hopkins' poems and prose works, this study traces the writer's engagement with his age.

How speculative realism impacts the art of literary criticism.

Reexamines the role of Spenser's work in English history and highlights the richness and complexity of his understanding of place. The volume centres on the idea that complex and allusive literary works such as The Faerie Queene must be read in the context of the cultural, literary, political, economic, and ideological forces at play in the highly allegorical poem.

Staring down the barrel of her fortieth year, Samantha Irby is confronting the ways her life has changed since the days she could work a full 11 hour shift on 4 hours of sleep, change her shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thought.

An artist's intensely personal reckoning that delves deep inside the making of art, and explores the value of facing, and depicting, the darkest of horrors.

In The Writer Abroad, Lucinda Hawksley takes us on a literary journey around the world, through extracts from Arthur Conan Doyle in Australia, Joseph Conrad in the Congo, Charles Dickens in Italy, Henry James in France, Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden, and many more.

By turns reflective, controversial, entertaining and moving, this book reveals how some of the most influential and best loved writers of our time were shaped by their inspirational teachers.

A celebration of the Virago Modern Classics

The love of place is endemic in English literature, from the work of the earliest poets and hermits to the suburban celebrations of John Betjeman, covering all varieties of the British rural and urban landscape. This book presents an image of Britain as seen by writers of different regions and periods.