A guide to Robert Browning including information about the author's life, context and works; an outline of the major critical issues surrounding his work; and explanation of the full range of different critical views and interpretations; suggestions for further reading.

Accessibly written throughout, this guidebook covers biographical details, information on the historical and social contexts of Browning's work, an overview of the full range of his work and a survey of the major critical debates surrounding him and his work.

This volume offers the broadest range of information on Jonson and his works, from background on contexts to details of recent interpretations of his plays.

Thomas Hardy was the foremost novelist of his time, as well as an established poet. This guide provides students with a lucid introduction to Hardy's life and works and the basis for a sound comprehension of his work.

This volume is part of a series of comprehensive, user-friendly introductions which offer basic information on an author's life, contexts and works.

This book is the first introduction to unite accessible accounts not only of Beckett's life and work, but of the key literary and theoretical concepts used in the study of his writing.

Robert Browning's pre-eminent status amongst Victorian poets has endured despite the recent broadening of the literary canon. He is the main practitioner of the period's most important poetic genre, the dramatic monologue, while his engagement with many aspects of nineteenth-century culture makes him a key figure in the wider field of Victorian studies. This stimulating introduction to Browning criticism provides an overview of the major responses to the poet's work over the last two hundred years. It offers an insightful guide to criticism from various theoretical perspectives, elucidating Browning's participation in Victorian debates about aesthetics, history, politics, religion, gender and psychology.

Annotation This guide moves beyond the controversy surrounding Lady Chatterley's Lover to examine the prolific output of poetry, novels and non-fiction that made Lawrence a central figure in the Modernist movement.

Who were Shakespeare's 'Friend' and the 'Dark Lady'? Why did Donne risk his life and ruin his career for a seventeen-year-old girl? Why did Wordsworth's sister retire to her bed on his wedding day? Writing never takes place in a vacuum and much of the finest poetry in the English language has been inspired by particular people - patrons, spouses, lovers, friends, or just casual acquaintances. Whether relegated to an obscurity they do not deserve or thrust into prominence they did not seek, their importance to the creative process is inescapable. In Where All the Ladders Start, Julian Lovelock discusses with characteristic incisiveness and enthusiasm nine major British poets and the real lives behind some of their most personal and significant works. Along the way he shows how poetry has developed over the past four hundred years and provides suggestions for further reading, while for convenience all of the relevant poems and extracts are reproduced in full. Written for both the seasoned reader and the student encountering these poems for the first time, Lovelock's analysis will inspire and entertain in equal measure.

A collection of critical essays assesses Browning's techniques, achievements, and place in literary history.