Literature & Poetry

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy ...

Myra Schneider's new collection brings a fresh sense of reality to some well-known images. Colour is the keynote of the book, moving through Matisse, Hockney, Chagall; sound too, in Mahler and Beethoven. Often we find skin-deep assumptions turned around.

PRAISE FOR WOLE SOYINKA: You don't see the things the same when you encounter a voice like that - Toni Morrison

One of the best there is today, a poet and a thinker, who knows both how the world works and how the world should work - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A towering figure in world literature, Wole ...

An anthology of some of the best known authors and illustrators from the First World War

Contains poems of night and winter, autumn and evening.

Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). ...

The exotic and dangerous stereotype of the Gypsy woman formed in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture remains alive today. These contemporary cliches about Gypsy culture - both negative and romanticised - have a long history. In The Gypsy Woman, Jodie Matthews analyses why the representation ...

Using new and cutting-edge perspectives, this book explores literary criticism and the reception of Aristotle's Poetics in early modern Italy. Written by leading international scholars, the chapters examine the current state of the field and set out new directions for future study.

The reception of ...

This book draws on the philosopher Rene Girard to argue that three twentieth-century American novels (Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road) are tragedies.

Until now, Girardian literary analysis has generally focused on representations ...

Jo Shapcott's award-winning first three collections, gathered in Her Book: Poems 1988-1998, revealed her to be a writer of ingenuous, politically acute and provocative poetry, and rightly earned her a reputation as one of the most original and daring voices of her generation.

When Dr. John Watson takes lodgings in Baker Street with the quirky consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, they are both quickly drawn into a mysterious case that has left Scotland Yard baffled. A man is found dead in a south London house, his face a mask of horror, but there are no signs of violence. ...

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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a novella written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886. London lawyer John Gabriel Utterson decides to investigate the appearance of the brutish and evil Edward Hyde, which leads him back to his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll.