This collection of critical essays covers hundreds of writers who have made significant contributions to British, Irish, and Commonwealth literature from the 14th century to the present day. The contributors analyze many individual works and engage the reader withtheir distinctive themes and stylistic. Introductory essays and chronological tables open each volume and provide historical background.

Through a study of the writings and intellectual development of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dr. Philip Ballinger demonstrates why poetry is, as Hans Urs von Balthasar stated, "the absolutely appropriate theological language". While circling Hopkins' visions of the nature of sensual experience, intuitive cognition, and the function of language, Ballinger focuses upon the sacramental intention of the Victorian Jesuit's poetry. Underlying Hopkins' poetry is a vision of reality as divinely revelatory or 'self-expressive'. For Hopkins, this revelatory character of creation is determined by the incarnation, and beauty, in fact, is a word for 'Christic self-expressiveness'.

An excellent starting point for both reference librarians and for library users seeking information about family history and the lives of others, this resource is drawn from the authoritative database of Guide to Reference, voted Best Professional Resource Database by Library Journal readers in 2012. Biographical resources have long been of interest to researchers and general readers, and this title directs readers to the best biographical sources for all regions of the world. For interest in the lives of those not found in biographical resources, this title also serves as a guide to the most useful genealogical resources. Profiling more than 1400 print and electronic sources, this book helps connect librarians and researchers to the most relevant sources of information in genealogy and biography.

"Essays, short stories and poems by eminent creative writers, critics and scholars from three continents celebrate the literary achievements of Barbara Hardy, the foremost exponent of close critical reading in the latter half of the twentieth century and today. Her work, as the essays in the volume bear witness, encompasses 19th and 20th century British fiction, poetry, and Shakespeare. In addition to an introduction outlining and assessing Hardy's career and writing, there is an extensive bibliography of her work. Comparatively short, concise essays, stories and poems by twenty distinguished hands express the eclectic nature of Barbara Hardy's work and themselves form a many-faceted critical/creative gathering. Form and Feeling moves away from the traditional festschrift to create an innovative critical genre that reflects the variety and nature of its subject's work. In addition to Barbara Hardy's own writing, authors and subjects treated include Anglo-Welsh poetry, nineteenth century fiction, Margaret Atwood, Wilkie Collins, Ivy Compton Burnet, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, G. M. Hopkins, Wyndham Lewis, George Meredith, Alice Meynell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Shakespeare, and W. B. Yeats, amongst others."

This collection of critical essays covers writers who have made significant contributions to British, Irish, and Commonwealth literature from the 14th century to the present day.

This collection of essays examines the way psychoactive substances are described and discussed within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literary and cultural texts. Covering several genres, such as novels, poetry, autobiography and non-fiction, individual essays provide insights on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century understandings of drug effects of opium, alcohol and many other plant-based substances. Contributors consider both contemporary and recent medical knowledge in order to contextualise and illuminate understandings of how drugs were utilised as stimulants, as relaxants, for pleasure, as pain relievers and for other purposes. Chapters also examine the novelty of experimentations of drugs in conversation with the way literary texts incorporate them, highlighting the importance of literary and cultural texts for addressing ethical questions.

First published in 2012. This work of introduction is designed to escort the reader through some six centuries of English literature. It begins in the fourteenth century at the point at which the language written in our country is recognizably our own, and ends in the 1950s. It is a compact survey, summing up the substance and quality of the individual achievements that make up our literature. The aim is to leave the reader informed about each writer’s main output, sensitive to the special character of his gifts, and aware of his place in the story of our literature as a whole.

This special edition of The Oxford Companion to the Brontës commemorates the bicentenary of Emily Brontë's birth in July 1818 and provides comprehensive and detailed information about the lives, works, and reputations of the Brontës - the three sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, their father, and their brother Branwell. Expanded entries surveying the Brontës' lives and works are supplemented by entries on friends and acquaintances, pets, literary and political heroes; on the places they knew and the places they imagined; on their letters, drawings and paintings; on historical events such as Chartism, the Peterloo Massacre, and the Ashantee Wars; on exploration, slavery, and religion. Selected entries on the characters and places in the Brontë juvenilia provide a glimpse into their early imaginative worlds, and entries on film, ballet, and musicals indicate the extent to which their works have inspired others. A new foreword to the text has been also penned by Claire Harman, award-winning writer and literary critic, and recent biographer of Charlotte Brontë. This is a unique and authoritative reference book for the research student and the general reader. The A-Z format, extensive cross-referencing, classified contents, chronologies, illustrations, and maps, both facilitate quick reference and encourage further exploration. This Companion is not only invaluable for quick searches, but a delight to browse, and an inspiration to further reading.

The book methodicallly graphs the direction of the English novel from its rise as the chief scholarly class in the mid twentieth century to its mid twenty first century status of unpredictable greatness in new media conditions. Precise parts address 'The English Novel as a Distinctly Modern Genre', 'The Novel in the Economy', 'Genres', 'Gender' (performativity, masculinities, woman's rights, eccentric), and 'The Burden of Representation' (class and ethnicity). Broadened contextualized close readings of more than twenty key writings from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) to Tom McCarthy's Satin Island (2015) supplement the methodical approach and energize future research by giving reviews of gathering and hypothetical points of view. Expanding specialization inside the teach of English and American Studies has moved the concentration of insightful dialog toward hypothetical reflection and social settings. These improvements have profited the train in more courses than one, yet they have likewise brought about a specific disregard of close perusing. Therefore, understudies and scientists inspired by such material are compelled to swing to grant from the 1970s, quite a bit of which depends on dated methodological and ideological presuppositions. The handbook means to fill this hole by giving new readings of writings that figure unmistakably in the writing classroom and in academic level headed discussion aE ' from James' The Ambassadors to McCarthy's The Road.

How to Find Out About Literature aims to provide a general survey of literatures and a general indication of the dates of these literatures. The book first elaborates on how to study and appreciate literature and how to trace literary works, including exercises and universal and national bibliographies. The text then examines how to trace poetry, drama, novels, and prose, foreign and subject bibliographies, library and sale catalogues, and guides to libraries, and literary information on general reference books and encyclopedias. The manuscript discusses how to trace literary information in handbooks and concordances to poetry and drama, handbooks and reference books on novelists and prose writers, dictionaries and guides to the English language and specialized subjects, essays, theses, and periodical articles. The text ponders on how to trace periodical articles and literary abstracts. The book is a valuable reference for students and researchers in their studies.