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.
Dorothy Wordsworth's Ecology
1st Edition
By Kenneth Cervelli
June 21, 2012
Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere),...
Poetic Language and Political Engagement in the Poetry of Keats
1st Edition
By Jack L. Siler
February 23, 2012
In this incisive volume Siler traces the uneasy relationship between the content of Keats' poems and social history. In the process, he discovers that the early poems are linked with the mission statement of the radical journal Annals of the Fine Arts, whilst the poems after Endymion reveal a ...
Politics and Aesthetics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf
1st Edition
By Joanne Tidwell
February 23, 2012
In this critical study, Tidwell examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted...
Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: “What’s aught but as ‘tis valued?”
1st Edition
By Peter F. Grav
February 23, 2012
Despite the volume of work Shakespeare produced, surprisingly few of his plays directly concern money and the economic mindset. Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative examines the five plays that do address monetary issues (The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, ...
Yeats and Theosophy
1st Edition
By Ken Monteith
February 23, 2012
When H. P. Blavatsky, the controversial head of the turn of the century movement Theosophy, defined "a true Theosophist" in her book The Key to Theosophy, she could have just as easily have been describing W. B. Yeats. Blavatsky writes, "A true Theosophist must put in practice the loftiest moral ...
Pynchon and the Political
1st Edition
By Samuel Thomas
December 15, 2011
Thomas Pynchon's writing has been widely regarded as an exemplary form of postmodern fiction. It is characterized as genre-defying and enigmatic, as a series of complex and esoteric language games. This study attempts to demonstrate, however, that an oblique yet compelling sense of the "political" ...
Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals
1st Edition
By Kathryn Prince
December 15, 2011
Based on extensive archival research, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals offers an entirely new perspective on popular Shakespeare reception by focusing on articles published in Victorian periodicals. Shakespeare had already reached the apex of British culture in the previous ...
American Flaneur: The Cosmic Physiognomy of Edgar Allan Poe
1st Edition
By James Werner
November 16, 2011
American Flaneur investigates the connections between Edgar A. Poe and the nineteenth-century flaneur - or strolling urban observer - suggested in Walter Benjamin's discussion of Baudelaire. This study illustrates the centrality of the flaneur to Poe's literary aims, and uses the flaneur to ...
Queer Impressions: Henry James' Art of Fiction
1st Edition
By Elaine Pigeon
November 16, 2011
Beginning with The Portrait of a Lady , this book shows how, in developing his unique form of realism, James highlights the tragic consequences of his American heroine's Romantic imagination, in particular, her Emersonian idealism. In order to expose Emerson's blind spot, a lacuna at the very ...
The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Novels
1st Edition
By Ann Ronchetti
November 16, 2011
This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family ...
Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens: The Performance of Modern Consciousness
1st Edition
By Sara J. Ford
May 16, 2011
This book traces the presence of the theater, both as an abstract concept and a literal space, in the plays and poetry of Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens as it attempts to explain the parallel depictions of consciousness that are found in both authors' work. Literary modernists inherited a self ...
Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood: Mapping the World in Household Words
1st Edition
By Sabine Clemm
January 06, 2011
Dickens, Journalism, and Nationhood examines Charles Dickens’ weekly family magazine Household Words in order to develop a detailed picture of how the journal negotiated, asserted and simultaneously deconstructed Englishness as a unified (and sometimes unifying) mode of expression. It offers ...