Literary studies: general

Gail Jones is one of Australia's foremost contemporary novelists. Her books have won or been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award, the Miles Franklin Award, the Stella Prize, and numerous state literary awards. They are taught in high...

Biography of a Book traces the life of an iconic Australian literary work in the lead-up to, and for a century after, its initial publication: Henry Lawson's 1896 collection While the Billy Boils. Paul Eggert follows Lawson's gradual development of a...

Aileen Palmer poet, translator, political activist, adventurer was the daughter of two writers prominent in Australian literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Vance and Nettie Palmer were well known as...

Shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction  Longlisted for the 2023 Margaret and Colin Roderick Literary AwardFrom the best-selling author of The Tall Man and The Arsonist, a personal tale about death, life...

Imagine looking over the shoulder of your favourite author and witnessing the moment they begin writing the opening chapter of their best-loved novel. What you might see is that the author has to write, cut and rewrite their words, often many times, in...

A fascinating and authoritative collection of essays examining the varied adaptations of and responses to Chaucer's work.The Geoffrey Chaucer of this book is not the Father of English Literature that you think you know. In this wide-ranging collection of...

A selection of the greatest sentences by the master, Ernest Hemingway. Sentences that can take a reader's breath away and are not easily forgotten. Each sentence has been selected and examined by authors such as Elizabeth Strout, Sherman Alexie, Paula...

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination - poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and...

George Kennedy's three volumes on classical rhetoric have long been regarded as authoritative treatments of the subject. This new volume, an extensive revision and abridgment of The Art of Persuasion in Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, and...

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readersMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed...

This new collection of essays on American poetry by Donald Davie (1922-1995) displays again 'the scale and range' of one of the great 'understanders' of poetry of our century, here fulfilling his chosen role as bridge-builder between poets, poetries and...

Rochester and the pursuit of pleasure provides a reading of Rochester's poems, dramatic works, and letters in a biographical context. In doing so, it sheds light on a central vexed issue in Rochester criticism, the relationship of the poet to his speaker...

Relics, Dreams, Voyages is a closely focused sequence of studies of worldwide connections in all the arts in the baroque period. Drawing on original research in libraries, collections, and archives in five countries, and in as many languages, this book...

Peter Hainsworth's sparkling, eminently readable new English translation ofThe Book of the Courtier, Baldesar Castiglione's (14781529) literary and philosophical masterpiece, captures all the nuance, stylistic flair, and humor of this...

Collecting the best of the underground blog Weird Sister, these unapologetic and insightful essays link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.Launched in 2014, Weird Sister proudly staked out a corner of the internet where feminist writers...

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music...

A poet who crafted thegreatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, John Milton connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic. HisParadise Lost is a touchstone of English literature.In the latest entry in...

A biography of the remarkable woman whose bestselling Mythology has introduced millions of readers to the classical world.Edith Hamilton (18671963) didn't publish her first book until she was sixty-two. But over the next three decades, this former...

How eighteenth-century literature depended on misinterpretation-and how this still shapes the way we readReading It Wrong is a new history of eighteenth-century English literature that explores what has been everywhere evident but rarely talked about:...

This unabridged, annotated English translation of Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino brings this popular Italian Renaissance romance to English readers for the first time.Jacopo Caviceo's Peregrino (1508) was a popular Renaissance prose romance in Italy, France,...

Tolkien For Beginners will introduce the reader to the multilayered depth and breadth of Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth, what critics, following Tolkien's lead, refer to collectively as his legendarium.J.R.R. Tolkien sweeps us away to a distant time and...

Barry Forshaw is acknowledged as a leading expert on European crime fiction, but his principal area of expertise is in the crime arena of the British Isles. Continuing the earlier success of the series with Nordic Noir and Euro Noir, he has now delivered...

Forker's critical edition fills the need for a fully annotated, historically contextualised and modernised text of the most important Elizabethan chronicle play apart from Shakespeare and Marlowe's Edward II.Now attributed definitely to George Peele,...

Selected as one of The Times Books of the Year 2017From the gothic fantasies of Walpole's Otranto to post-modern takes on the country house by Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan, Phyllis Richardson guides us on a tour through buildings real and imagined to...

This beautiful collection brings together passages from the renowned stories, poems, dramas and myths of South Asian literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Drawing on the translations published by the Clay Sanskrit Library, the book...

This lively retelling of the myth of the voyage of St Brendan from Ireland to America is illustrated with original linocuts by American artist Kathleen Neeley. Jackson's third poetry collection is an engaging and spirited interpretation of the tale,...

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it.Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to...

Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of this career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned Paris books -...

"One of the Year's Best," Times Literary SupplementWhen a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous...

This book is the first edited collection to focus on the work of contemporary author Hari Kunzru. It contains major new essays on each of his novels The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill as well as...

The heat of Beowulf develops a new approach to the aesthetics of Beowulf by engaging with the work of twentieth-century poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer, whose avant-garde poetics were informed by a serious encounter with the poem in the seminar of...

Combining the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities, this book examines McCarthy's literary works as a significant case study demonstrating our need to recognise the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental...

This book investigates the troubled relationship between medieval studies and medievalism. Acknowledging that the medieval and medievalism are mutually constitutive, and that their texts can be read using similar strategies, it argues that medieval...

This unique and exciting collection, inspired by the scholarship of literary critic Stephanie Trigg, offers cutting-edge responses to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer for the current critical moment. The chapters are linked by the organic and naturally...

This edition presents a thoroughly reconsidered text based on collation of all known copies of the 1608 quarto (including material unnoticed by earlier editors). Textual analysis draws on detailed internal investigation and the printer's wider practice...

Before the idea of the Anthropocene, there was the angry planet How might we understand an earthquake as a complaint, or erosion as a form of protest-in short, the Earth as an angry planet? Many novels from the end of the millennium did just that,...

This is the first graphic novel adaptation of Lazarillo de Tormes, an anonymous sixteenth-century work that is credited with founding the literary genre of the picaresque novel. This genre includes not only works by Spanish authors like Miguel de...

The Logic of Love in the Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great...

Marking the bicentenary of Dostoevsky's birth, Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity takes the writer's art specifically the tension between experience and formal representation as its central theme. While many critical approaches to Dostoevsky's...

A monumental event in American poetry, Get the Money!brings together the essential prose writings of iconic New York School poet Ted Berrigan."Ted Berrigan was a leader of the New York School; his crazy energy embodied that movement and the city itself...

Newly available in paperback, Historical literatures recovers a rich, vibrant and complex tradition of Restoration and early eighteenth century English historical writing. Highlighting the wide variety of historical works being printed and read in...

This study examines the writing career of the respected and prolific novelist Doris Lessing, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.Whereas earlier assessments have focused on Lessing's relationship with feminism and the impact of her...

Philip Massinger's tragedy The Roman Actor, was first performed in 1626, as King James I's reign came to an end and his son Charles I acceded to the throne. Three years later, when the play was published, relations between the king and many in parliament...

This study examines the full range of Carlos Fuentes' art, from the critical realism of his early novels to his highly experimental novels of the late sixties, and to his novels from the eighties where national identities are playfully evoked and largely...

This volume explores the characteristics of the art and literature of the Second Empire in France; it examines the attitudes and positioning of artists and writers of the period in relation to a regime of dubious legitimacy, and the ways in which that...

The Republic of Letters emerged during the seventeenth century as a concept to describe the interaction between scholars across Europe and beyond. While the concept was an imaginary one, it was firmly grounded in a reality of close circles of interaction...

New D.H. Lawrence uses current and emergent approaches in literary studies to explore one of Britain's major modernist writers. The collection features new work by the present generation of Lawrence scholars, who are brought together here for the first...

Humankind has always been fascinated by the world in which it finds itself, and puzzled by its relations to it. Today that fascination is often expressed in what is now called 'green' terms, reflecting concerns about the non-human natural world,...