Studies in Major Literary Authors
About the Book Series
Studies in Major Literary Authors features outstanding scholarship on celebrated and neglected authors of both canonical and lesser-known texts.
Shelley's Intellectual System and its Epicurean Background
1st Edition
By Michael Vicario
August 12, 2014
Scholars do not agree on how best to describe Shelley’s philosophical stance. His work has been variously taken to be that of a skeptic or a skeptical and subjective idealist. The study presents a new interpretation of Shelley’s thinking – an interpretation that places ‘intellectual system’ ...
The End of Learning: Milton and Education
1st Edition
By Thomas Festa
August 12, 2014
This book shows that education constitutes the central metaphor of John Milton's political as well as his poetic writing. Demonstrating how Milton's theory of education emerged from his own practices as a reader and teacher, this book analyzes for the first time the relationship between Milton's ...
In the Shadows of Divine Perfection: Derek Walcott's Omeros
1st Edition
By Lance Callahan
July 17, 2014
In the Shadows of Divine Perfection provides an examination of Derek Walcott's Omeros 1990)- the St. Lucian poet's longest work, and the piece that secured his Nobel Laureate-that reveals the deep-seated bond between the root narratives of ancient Greece to the cultural products and practices of ...
Conrad's Narratives of Difference: Not Exactly Tales for Boys
1st Edition
By Lissa Schneider
June 09, 2014
In Joseph Conrad’s tales, representations of women and of "feminine" generic forms like the romance are often present in fugitive ways. Conrad’s use of allegorical feminine imagery, fleet or deferred introductions of female characters, and hybrid generic structures that combine features of "...
D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing: Colonialism in His Travel Writing and Leadership Novels
1st Edition
By Eunyoung Oh
June 09, 2014
D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing builds upon developments within postcolonial theory to argue for a reconsideration of the concept of "spirit of place" in D. H. Lawrence’s travel books and "leadership" novels – works that record Lawrence’s various encounters with racial and geographical "others...
Frederick Douglass's Curious Audiences: Ethos in the Age of the Consumable Subject
1st Edition
By Terry Baxter
June 09, 2014
This book attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did Douglass manage to persuade anyone about the evils of slavery, and even impress viewers with his personal qualities, when his speeches were commonly considered mere entertainment, in the same category as Barnum's circus acts? In answering...
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism: A Heart in Hiding
1st Edition
By Jill Muller
June 09, 2014
This book restores the poet to his full intellectual and literary context as a Victorian convert to Catholicism....
Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources
1st Edition
By Rachel Wetzsteon
June 09, 2014
Influential Ghosts: A Study of Auden's Sources explores some of the most important literary and philosophical influences on W.H. Auden's poetry. The study attempts to show that Auden's poetry derives much of its interest from the vast range of authors on whom he drew for inspiration. But it also ...
T.S. Eliot's Civilized Savage: Religious Eroticism and Poetics
1st Edition
By Laurie MacDiarmid
June 09, 2014
T. S. Eliot's Civilized Savage revisits this poet's drafts and canonical poetry in a sometimes dismissive critical arena . While contemporary readers emphasize Eliot's charged personal life, his anti-Semitism, his political conservatism, and his misogyny, Laurie MacDiarmid argues that although ...
The Machine that Sings: Modernism, Hart Crane and the Culture of the Body
1st Edition
By Gordon A. Tapper
May 30, 2014
Examining how Crane's corporeal aesthetic informs poems written across the span of his career, The Machine That Sings focuses on four texts in which Crane's preoccupation with the body reaches its apoge. Tapper treats Voyages, The Wine Merchant, and Possessions as a triptych of erotic poems in ...
Thoughts Painfully Intense: Hawthorne and the Invalid Author
1st Edition
By James Mancall
January 16, 2014
First Published in 2002. This work reads Hawthorne's fiction inthe context of nineteenth-century medical and psuedomedical discourse that linked men of letters to debilitated invalids, a stereotype against which Hawthorne struggled throughout his career....
Lost City: Fitzgerald's New York
1st Edition
By Lauraleigh O'Meara
January 14, 2014
F. Scott Fitzgerald left behind a substantial body of work on New York, yet his city remains in our time terra incognita, talked about but rarely well met. Lost City takes on this important and under-examined, indeed misunderstood and misrepresented, aspect of Fitzgerald's writing. The author shows...