Studying English Literature is a unique guide for undergraduates beginning to study the discipline of literature and those who are thinking of doing so. Unlike books that provide a survey of literary history or non-subject specific manuals that offer rigid guidelines on how to write essays, Studying English Literature invites students to engage with the subject's history and theory whilst at the same time offering information about reading, researching and writing about literature within the context of a university. The book is practical yet not patronizing: for example, whilst the discussion of plagiarism provides clear guidelines on how not to commit this offence, it also considers the difficulties students experience finding their own 'voice' when writing and provokes reflection on the value of originality and the concepts of adaptation, appropriation and intertextuality in literature. Above all, the book prizes the idea of argument rather than insisting upon formulaic essay plans, and gives many ways of finding something to say as you read and when you write, in chapters on Reading, Argument, Essays, Sentences and References.

This new edition of an established text provides a succinct and up-to-date historical overview of the story of English literature. Focusing on how writing both reflects and challenges the periods in which it is produced, John Peck and Martin Coyle combine close readings of key texts with recent critical thinking on the interaction of literary works and culture. Providing a lively introductory guide to English literature from Beowulf to the present day, the authors write in their characteristically lucid and accessible style. A true masterpiece of clarity and compression, this is essential reading for undergraduate students coming across the vast areas of English literature for the first time and looking for a way of making critical sense of the texts being studied. In addition, the concise nature and narrative structure of this book makes it excellent reading for general readers. New to this Edition: - Revised chapter on twentieth century literature - Complete new chapter on twenty-first century literature - Updated Chronology and Further Reading section

An introduction to literary theory unlike any other, Ten Lessons in Theory engages its readers with three fundamental premises. The first premise is that a genuinely productive understanding of theory depends upon a considerably more sustained encounter with the foundational writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than any reader is likely to get from the introductions to theory that are currently available. The second premise involves what Fredric Jameson describes as "the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan's is the richest." Entertaining this conviction, the book pays more (and more careful) attention to the richness of Lacan's writing than does any other introduction to literary theory. The third and most distinctive premise of the book is that literary theory isn't simply theory "about" literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all. Ten Lessons in Theory argues, and even demonstrates, that "theoretical writing" is nothing if not a specific genre of "creative writing," a particular way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble sentences that make, or desire to make, radical changes in the very fabric of social reality. As its title indicates, the book proceeds in the form of ten "lessons," each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canon of theoretical writing. Each lesson works by creatively unpacking its featured sentence and exploring the sentence's conditions of possibility and most radical implications. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these troubling sentences, the ten lessons work and play together to articulate the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Provided in each lesson is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a footnote. But while each lesson constitutes a precise explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a "practice of creativity" (Foucault) in itself.

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An illuminating look at the poetic debut in twentieth-century American literary culture "We have many poets of the First Book," the poet and critic Louis Simpson remarked in 1957, describing a sense that the debut poetry collection not only launched the contemporary poetic career but also had come to define it. Surveying American poetry over the past hundred years, The First Book explores the emergence of the poetic debut as a unique literary production with its own tradition, conventions, and dynamic role in the literary market. Through new readings of poets ranging from Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore to John Ashbery and Louise Glück, Jesse Zuba illuminates the importance of the first book in twentieth-century American literary culture, which involved complex struggles for legitimacy on the part of poets, critics, and publishers alike. Zuba investigates poets' diverse responses to the question of how to launch a career in an increasingly professionalized literary scene that threatened the authenticity of the poetic calling. He shows how modernist debuts evoke markedly idiosyncratic paths, while postwar first books evoke trajectories that balance professional imperatives with traditional literary ideals. Debut titles ranging from Simpson's The Arrivistes to Ken Chen's Juvenilia stress the strikingly pervasive theme of beginning, accommodating a new demand for career development even as it distances the poets from that demand. Combining literary analysis with cultural history, The First Book will interest scholars and students of twentieth-century literature as well as readers and writers of poetry.

"English Literature: Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World" by William J. Long resents the whole splendid history of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the close of the Victorian Era. It's a useful and interesting guide for students as well as teachers of English literature, specially European and American, despite over a hundred years passing since the time of its first publication.

This essential Middle English textbook, now in its third edition, introduces students to the wide range of literature written in England between 1150 and 1400. New, thoroughly revised edition of this essential Middle English textbook. Introduces the language of the time, giving guidance on pronunciation, spelling, grammar, metre, vocabulary and regional dialects. Now includes extracts from 'Pearl' and Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde'. Bibliographic references have been updated throughout. Each text is accompanied by detailed notes.

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.