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British Literature
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The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland
by Ronald Carter, John McRae. 572 pgs.Wide-ranging and accessible, this textbook covers the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature from AD 600 to the present day. It includes extensive accompanying language notes which explore the interrelationships between language and literature. The narrative is underpinned by quotations from poetry, prose and drama. - 4 .
The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature
by David Loewenstein, Janel Mueller. 1038 pgs.This is a comprehensive history of English literature written in Britain between the Reformation and the Restoration. While it focuses on England, literary effort in Scotland and Ireland is also covered, with occasional references to Wales and Ireland. This literary history by an international team of scholars is essential reading for students and scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, culture, and history. - 5 .
Dominic Head demonstrates how the novel yields a special insight into important areas of social and cultural history in the second half of the twentieth-century. His study is the most exhaustive survey of post-war British fiction available. Placing novels in their social and historical context, it includes chapters on the state and the novel, class and social change, gender and sexual identity, national identity, and multiculturalism. Accessible and wide-ranging, this is the most current introduction to the subject available. - 6 .
Epic Voices: Inner and Global Impulse in the Contemporary American and British Novel
by Robert Arlett. 192 pgs. - 7 .
Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature
by Claude J. Summers, Ted-Larry Pebworth. 236 pgs. - 8 .
Intercultural Voices in Contemporary British Literature: The Implosion of Empire
by Lars Ole Sauerberg. 228 pgs.During the last decades of the 20th century it has become increasingly difficult to consider British literature as "national" or "mainstream." This book investigates contemporary fiction and poetry written in or relating to Britain, and uncovers a distinct sense of a new and different national and social reality. Tracing literary effects of migration, globalization, and regionalization, the book focuses on literary tradition as an inspiration or object of hate and frustration for the exploration and expression of post-imperial experiences. - 9 .
Covering a wide range of authors, among them Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning, Clare, Mary Shelley, and Disraeli, Cronin brings light and order to one of the murkiest quarters in recent British literary history. Brimming with intelligent and original perceptions about authors or works that have fallen through literary-historical cracks, Romantic Victorians offers shrewd assessments of their formal and tactical designs. This is a literary period in which literature fully entered the marketplace, and in which an ideology was constitued - civic, domestic, Christian and imperial - that was to inform British society for more than a century. These are among the issues that Cronin addresses and, in so doing, successfully restructures nineteenth-century literary studies. - 10 .
Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski
by Amy Boesky, Mary Thomas Crane. 370 pgs. - 11 .
Sieges were a popular subject in medieval romances. Tales of the Crusades featured champions of Christianity capturing towns in the Holy Land or mounting heroic defences. The fall of a great city such as Troy, Thebes, or Jerusalem provided opportunities for the recreation of ancient chivalry and for reflections on historical change. Images of the siege in romances also point to other forms, such as drama and love allegory, where it represents the trial of the soul or the pursuit of the beloved. This book is the first full-length study of an important theme in medieval literature. Close reading of selected Middle English shows how writers used descriptions of sieges to explore such subjects as military strategy, heroism, chivalry, and attitudes to the past. This study also draws on a wide range of writings in several languages, to set the romances in a broad context. When they are seen against a background of military manuals, patristic commentary, pageantry, and love poetry, the sieges of romance take on deeper resonances of meaning and reflect the vitality of the theme in medieval culture as a whole. - 12 .
This book examines how English writers from the Elizabethan period to the Restoration transformed and contested the ancient ideal of the virtuous mean. As early modern authors learned at grammar school and university, Aristotle and other classical thinkers praised "golden means" balanced between extremes: courage, for example, as opposed to cowardice or recklessness. By uncovering the enormous variety of English responses to this ethical doctrine, Joshua Scodel revises our understanding of the vital interaction between classical thought and early modern literary culture.Scodel argues that English authors used the ancient schema of means and extremes in innovative and contentious ways hitherto ignored by scholars. Through close readings of diverse writers and genres, he shows that conflicting representations of means and extremes figured prominently in the emergence of a self-consciously modern English culture. Donne, for example, reshaped the classical mean to promote individual freedom, while Bacon held extremism necessary for human empowerment. Imagining a modern rival to ancient Rome, georgics from Spenser to Cowley exhorted England to embody the mean or lauded extreme paths to national greatness. Drinking poetry from Jonson to Rochester expressed opposing visions of convivial moderation and drunken excess, while erotic writing from Sidney to Dryden and Behn pitted extreme passion against the traditional mean of conjugal moderation. Challenging his predecessors in various genres, Milton celebrated golden means of restrained pleasure and self-respect. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Scodel suggests how early modern treatments of means and extremes resonate in present-day cultural debates. - 13 .
Challenging recent work contending that seventeenth-century English discourses privilege the notion of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient individual, this study recovers a counter-tradition that imagines selves as more passively prompted than actively choosing. Gordon traces the origins of such ideas of passivity from their roots in the non-conformist religious tradition to their flowering in one of the central texts of eighteenth-century literature, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. - 14 .
Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature
by Christopher Hodgkins. 290 pgs.The strength of Empire, " wrote Ben Jonson, "is in religion." In Reforming Empire, Christopher Hodgkins takes Jonson's dictum as his point of departure, showing how for more than four centuries the Protestant imagination gave the British Empire its main paradigms for dominion and also, ironically, its chief languages of anti-imperial dissent. From Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King, " English literature about empire has turned with strange constancy to themes of worship and idolatry, atrocity and deliverance, slavery and service, conversion, prophecy, apostasy, and doom.Hodgkins organizes his study around three kinds of religious binding -- unification, subjugation, and self-restraint. He details how early modern Protestants like Hakluyt and Spenser reformed the Arthurian chronicles and claimed to inherit Rome's empire from the Caesars: how Ralegh and later Cromwell imagined a counterconquest of Spanish America, and how Milton's Satan came to resemble Cortes; how Drake and the fictional Crusoe established their status as worthy colonial masters by refusing to be worshiped as gods; and how seventeenth-century preachers, poets, and colonists moved haltingly toward a racist metaphysics -- as Virginia began by celebrating the mixed marriage of Pocahontas but soon imposed the draconian separation of the Color Line.
Yet Hodgkins reveals that Tudor-Stuart times also saw the revival of Augustinian anti-expansionism and the genesis of Protestant imperial guilt. From the start, British Protestant colonialism contained its own opposite: a religion of self-restraint. Though this conscience often was co-opted or conscripted to legitimize conquests andpacify the conquered, it frequently found memorable and even fierce literary expression in writers such as Shakespeare, Daniel, Herbert, Swift, Johnson, Burke, Blake, Austen, Browning, Tennyson, Conrad, Forster, and finally
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Discusses the significance of the French Revolution in English literary and cultural history, particularly in the works of Edmund Burke, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. - 16 .
