This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature. Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include the hauntingly meditative Urn-Burial, and the elaborate The Garden of Cyrus, a work that borders on a madness of infinite pattern. Religio Medici, probably Browne's most famous work, is at once autobiography, intricate religious-scientific paradox, and a monument of tolerance in the era of the English civil war. This volume also includes his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, an encyclopaedia of error which contains within its vast remit the entire intellectual landscape of the seventeenth centuryits science, its natural history, its painting, its history, its geography and its biblical oddities. The volume enables students to experience the ways in which Browne brings his lucid, baroque and stylish prose to bear across this range of diverse material, together with a carefully poised wit. This volume contains almost all of the author's work that was published in his lifetime, as well as a selection of writings published after his death. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Browne.

This lively and original book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. Michiel Heyns depicts the nineteenth-century literary scapegoat - the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot - as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticize. Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the nineteenth century: Austen's Mansfield Park, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Conrad's Lord Jim, and James's The Golden Bowl. Michiel Heyns looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel in the centre of current debates, while yet respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of the its critics.

The first major study of Dickens's villains argues that they embody the crucial fusion between the 'deviant' and the 'theatrical' aspects of Dickens's writing. Dickens's Villains locates the rationale for his theatrical characters in his political commitment to the principle of cultural inclusivity and his related resistance to 'psychology'.

In what was once described as "the century of nerves", a fascination with the mysterious processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This study offers an integrated analysis of how medicine and literature figured the connection between the body and the mind. Alongside detailed examinations of some of the century's most influential neurological and physiological theories, Jane Wood brings readings of both major and relatively neglected fictions - a range which includes work by Charlotte Bronte and George MacDonald, George Eliot and Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing. Stepping into an already lively area of interdisciplinary debate, Passion and Pathology is distinguished by its recognition of the intellectual and imaginative force of both discourses: it extends our understanding of the interaction between science and literature in the wider culture of the period.

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Fiction / Classics;

Guilty But Insane takes an historical approach to golden age detective fiction by Margery Allingham, Christianna Brand, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Gladys Mitchell. It examines how writers and readers of detective fiction during the 1920s to 1940s understood guilt, responsibility, and the workings of the mind as they related to the commission, the investigation, and the punishment of crime. Under the lens of psychology, the detective novel is revealed as a site for the negotiation of competing interpretations of sanity and insanity. An unexplored depth and subtlety is revealed in detective novels that address major controversies in legal and psychiatric theory and practice, while significant resonances with specific concerns of modernist fiction come into focus for the first time. During the interwar years, proponents of competing psychological schools challenged legal concepts of responsibility and free will. In response, golden age writers began to reflect on the genre's promise to accomplish true and just solutions in a social order in which the relationship between law and justice was being problematized on several fronts. By making connections between high modernism and popular culture, and by tracing the impact of psychological discourses across a range of different cultural outputs, this book makes a persuasive case for reading detective fiction historically. It aims to demonstrate the richness of these texts and their value for scholarship, not only as historical documents or residues of discourse, but as literary texts which challenge, subvert, toy with and test the prevailing values and prejudices of interwar Britain.

Eliot is the rare case of a great poet who was also an academic philosopher. Donald Childs' study examines the relationship between Elliot's writing of poetry and his philosophical pursuits, in particular his lifelong occupation with the work of F.H. Bradley, Henri Bergson, and William James. This account also considers the reception of Eliot's writing in philosophy and argues that the study of this work has significantly entered recent Eliot criticism. Overall, this volume provides a new reading of Eliot's famous poems, his literary criticism, and social commentary.

This edition of the papyrus containing Didymos' comments on some of Demosthenes' speeches aims to provide the student with a new reading of the text, a facing translation that is carefully edited for those who cannot use the Greek to show what is extant and what is restored, and a detailed
commentary that considers all issues related to the restoration of the text and to its historical content. All Greek is translated into English so that the discussion is fully accessible. In addition, throughout the introduction and commentary an attempt is made to arrive at a balanced appraisal of
Didymos' position in the history of scholarship.

The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. It is often claimed that unlike the British novel or the novel in indigenous Indian languages, Anglophone fiction in India has no genealogy of its own. Interrogating this received idea, Priyamvada Gopal shows how the English-language or Anglophone Indian novel is a heterogeneous body of fiction in which certain dominant trends and recurrent themes are, nevertheless, discernible. It is a genre that has been distinguished from its inception by a preoccupation with both history and nation as these come together to shape what scholars have termed 'the idea of India'. Structured around themes such as 'Gandhi and Fiction', 'The Bombay Novel', and 'The Novel of Partition', this study traces lines of influence across significant literary works and situates individual writers and texts in their historical context. Its emergence out of the colonial encounter and nation-formation has impelled the Anglophone novel to return repeatedly to the question: 'What is India?' In the most significant works of Anglophone fiction, 'India' emerges not just as a theme but as a point of debate, reflection, and contestation. Writers whose works are considered in their context include Rabindranath Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth.

Utilizing recent trends in literary and language theory, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" makes new theoretical insights available to its audience. Contributors to this volume employ analytical and interpretive strategies which are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The collection's essays, which are arranged into three groups focusing on the textual level, narrative and context, explore a number of 20th century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this user-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Designed not only for native English speakers, but also for those who read English as a foreign or second language, "Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context" provides an indispensable introduction which is both sensitive and enabling.

By applying recent trends in literary and language theory to a range of 20th Century fiction, the contributors to this text make new theoretical insights available to student readers. The analytical and interpretive strategies examined in this book are not intended to be prescriptive, rather they are presented in such a way as to facilitate critical reading and evaluation.
The essays, which are arranged into three groups and which focus on the textual level, narrative and context, look at a wide range of Twentieth Century authors including Fowles, Foster, Lessing and Woolf. In addition, this student-friendly text includes a detailed subject index, a full glossary and helpful suggestions for further reading.
Aimed at beginning students of English Language and Literature and Applied Linguistics, and advanced students of English as a Foreign or Second Language, 20th Century Fiction provides an essential introduction to the subject which is both sensitive and enabling.

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature itself. He traces the history of names through Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Joyce, and Nabokov, showing how names often turn out to be the thematic focus. Fowler shows that the associations of names, at first limited, become increasingly salient and sophisticated as literature itself develops.

A richly annotated and textually reliable edition of Hardy's numerous public utterances, from formal essays and speeches to anonymous contributions to literary gossip-columns. Many are newly identified as Hardy's, and he is revealed as having been much more actively involved with contemporary issues - literary, social, political, or merely local - than previously realized.

From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist, autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature, and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography, Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets, Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The present book traces the history of that shared experience. It recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class 1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940 alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon. At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape: Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the oppression of Stalinist Communism.
Alongside the narrative of Jameson's life, and the experiences as daughter, wife, and mother that shaped her personality and her career, the book explores her concern with issues of culture and society, cultural memory, and cultural landscapes, her fascination with aesthetic form and the relation of writing to politics, her insight into the materiality of words, and her persistent probing of the nature of the writing subject. It draws on unpublished archive material and brings new research on neglected areas of cultural history into conjunction with literary-critical analyses of Jameson's novels and studies of her journalism and essays. There is an extensive Bibliography of her work.

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature.

"What's this you're writing?... asked Pooh, climbing onto the writing table. "The Tao of Pooh,... I replied. "The how of Pooh?... asked Pooh, smudging one of the words I had just written. "The Tao of Pooh,... I replied, poking his paw away with my pencil. "It seems more like ow! of Pooh,... said Pooh, rubbing his paw. "Well, it's not,... I replied huffily. "What's it about?... asked Pooh, leaning forward and smearing another word. "It's about how to stay happy and calm under all circumstances!... I yelled. "Have you read it?... asked Pooh... ...Winnie-the-Pooh has a certain way about him, a way of doing things that has made him the world's most beloved bear, and Pooh's Way, as Benjamin Hoff brilliantly demonstrates, seems strangely close to the ancient Chinese principles of Taoism. Follow the Pooh Way in this humorous and enlightening introduction to Taoism, with classic decorations by E.H.Shepard throughout. Over a million copies sold to date. This deluxe anniversary edition is a beautiful gift for any fans of this classic title or everyone's favourite bear.

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic and attractive Mr Rochester. However, there is great kindness and warmth in this epic love story, which is set against the magnificent backdrop of the Yorkshire moors. Ultimately the grand passion of Jane and Rochester is called upon to survive cruel revelation, loss and reunion, only to be confronted with tragedy.

Let acclaimed Tolkien artist John Howe take you on an unforgettable journey across Middle-earth, from Bag End to Mordor, in this richly illustrated sketchbook fully of previously unseen artwork, anecdotes and meditations on Middle-earth. Middle-earth has been mapped, Bilbo's and Frodo's journeys plotted and measured, but it remains a wilderland for all that. The roads as yet untravelled far outnumber those down which J.R.R. Tolkien led us in his writings. A Middle-earth Traveller presents a walking tour of Tolkien's Middle-earth, visiting not only places central to his stories, but also those just over the hill or beyond the horizon. Events from Tolkien's books are explored - battles of the different ages that are almost legend by the time of The Lord of the Rings; lost kingdoms and ancient myths, as well as those places only hinted at: kingdoms of the far North and lands beyond the seas. Sketches that have an 'on-the-spot' feel to them are interwoven with the artist's observations gleaned from Tolkien's books as he paints pictures with his words as well as his pencil. He also recollects his time spent working alongside Peter Jackson on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies. Combining concept work produced for films, existing Middle-earth art and dozens of new paintings and sketches exclusive to this book, A Middle-earth Traveller will take the reader on a unique and unforgettable journey across Tolkien's magical landscape.

Carol A. Senf traces the vampire's evolution from folklore to twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian England, including Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its sexuality.

The first of three volumes charting the history of the Modernist Magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of 'little magazines' which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and artistic modernism in the UK and Ireland.
In thirty-seven chapters covering over eighty magazines expert contributors investigate the inner dynamics and economic and intellectual conditions that governed the life of these fugitive but vibrant publications. We learn of the role of editors and sponsors, the relation of the arts to contemporary philosophy and politics, the effects of war and economic depression and of the survival in hard times of radical ideas and a belief in innovation. The chapters are arranged according to historical themes with accompanying contextual introductions, and include studies of the New Age, Blast, the Egoist and the Criterion, New Writing, New Verse, and Scrutiny as well as of lesser known magazines such as the Evergreen, Coterie, the Bermondsey Book, the Mask, Welsh Review, the Modern Scot, and the Bell.
To return to the pages of these magazines returns us a world where the material constraints of costs and anxieties over censorship and declining readerships ran alongside the excitement of a new poem or manifesto. This collection therefore confirms the value of magazine culture to the field of modernist studies; it provides a rich and hitherto under-examined resource which both brings to light the debate and dialogue out of which modernism evolved and helps us recover the vitality and potential of that earlier discussion.

A scholarly edition of a work by Jane Austen, presenting an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This is the first monograph in English on the Panegyrici Latini, and the first in any language dedicated to the five speeches of praise from 289 - 307. The study considers how the orators justified, accommodated, and projected changes and related them to the local concerns of the people of Northern Gaul. Detailed analyses of the speeches highlight the literary flair and diplomatic acumen their orators required. As various ideologies and attitudes are charted over the five speeches, panegyric is seen to be a genre of great versatility and potential.