Understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, providing the first extensive study in English of his early literary works. The name Friedrich Nietzsche resonates around the world. Although known primarily as a philosopher, Nietzsche began his writing career while still a boy with literary texts: poetry, prose, and dramas. The present book is the first extensive study in English of these early literary works. It understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through his first two years as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, that is, through the 1872 publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Knowledge of Nietzsche's early literary writings further underscores the value of The Birth of Tragedy as a work of world literature. The present study makes available almost all of Nietzsche's early poetry and extensive excerpts from his early prose works and dramas - much of it in English for the first time - along with commentary. A final, extensive chapter on The Birth of Tragedy treats it as the culmination of the early literary works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.

A Bottle, a bag, a rock you feast from the womb to the tomb, in the belly of the Beast, the County Morgue and a Life of Crime As you S c r e a m for a Hit, One more time, A Bottomless pit trapped with scorn, a Dopefiend Dies but another one... was born...

First full-length biography for 30 years of the great First World War poet. Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Rosenberg died on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets. Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army.

This is the long-awaited supplementary volume to the authoritative seven-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate and Richard Purdy, that was published by OUP between 1978 and 1988. Volume 8, edited by Millgate in collaboration with leading Hardy scholar Professor Keith Wilson, contains previously unpublished letters from all periods of Hardy's career, his earliest known letter among them. It introduces important new correspondents, throws fresh light on existing correspondences, and richly enhances the reader's understanding of both familiar and hitherto unfamiliar aspects of Hardy's life and work and of the times in which he lived.

The second volume of Max Saunders's magisterial biography of Ford Madox Ford takes up the story from Ford's enlistment in the army and departure for France in 1916. Like its predecessor, The After-War World makes full use of previously unpublished and long-lost material. It is the first biography to establish Ford's importance to modern literature: exploring the relations between a writer's life, autobiography, and fiction, and showing how Ford's case challenges the conventions of literary biography itself. Saunders provides a ground-breaking reading of Ford's post-war masterpiece, Parade's End, and describes the founding of the transatlantic review, the influential literary journal that published Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Picasso, and many more major writers and artists. Ford's personal relationships were no less complex than his work: while living with Stella Bowen after the breakup of his partnership with Violet Hunt he had a brief affair with Jean Rhys, but he was to spend his final years until his death in 1939, with the Polish American painter Janice Biala. Throughout his career Ford endlessly reinvented himself, and this biography, for the first time, offers a sustained and critical account of his dazzling literary transformations.

The first volume of a major new critical biography Ford Madox Ford wrote some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, mastering and metamorphosing all its major forms: the novel, literary criticism, travel writing, even historical and cultural discourse. He was also an innovative and influential poet, as well as the century's greatest literary editor. He collaborated with Joseph Conrad, and advised Ezra Pound; his admirers include novelists as diverse as Sinclair Lewis, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and Gore Vidal. This first volume of a two-volume life takes Ford from his birth as Ford Hermann Hueffer in 1873 to the eve of his departure for France, and war, in 1916. It charts his growth and development as a writer of great complexity, first with the trilogy The Fifth Queen and culminating in his masterpiece The Good Soldier. It also examines his turbulent emotional life, from his elopement and marriage to Elsie Martindale in 1894 to his affair with Violet Hunt in the same year that he founded The English Review. Ford said that a writer's life is 'a dual affair', a life enshrined in the writing and Max Saunders's aim is to examine the interconnections between the private and the public life, and the inner life that drove him. The discovery of new manuscripts, and of letters unavailable to previous biographers ensure that this is the most important and exhaustive critical biography of Ford to appear in the last twenty years.

By a River, On a Hill brings you into the lives of twins born during the depression in a small steel mill town in Western Pennsylvania and carries you through the depression, the war, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge and on to two completely different routes of success of each to his chosen profession. One who gains his success on a journey that carries him to Argentina for three years and later to Brazil for three years fighting for acceptance in his chosen field until gaining the recognition he deserves, becoming Chief consultant for U.S. Steel on Coke Oven problem solving and eventually establishing an international construction company. The other, who gains his initial success through invention of integrated circuits before becoming an expert in the production of the "chip" and finally his success in Silicon Valley competing against the world's best technical minds in a tough semiconductor industry, eventually playing the major role in taking a small test company to be a successful Analog Semiconductor Company. The story carries you with them through their early experiences, the Navy, the tough steel mills and finally in their tough fields of endeavor; carrying you as it carried them. You experience their obstacles and their triumphs as if you were there working your way up, side by side and battling for a place in the sun. The title of the book relates to the goals of the twins which are as different as their paths to reach them.

A fascinating new study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'The Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' illuminates the poet's deeply troubled personality and stormy personal life through a highly original study of his relationships. In her last published work the celebrated Coleridgean scholar, Molly Lefebure, provides profound psychological insights into Coleridge through a meticulous study of his domestic life, drawing upon a vast and unique body of knowledge gained from a lifetime's study of the poet, and making skilful use of the letters, poems and biographies of the man himself and his family and friends. The author traces the roots of Coleridge's unarguably dysfunctional personality from his earliest childhood; his position as his mother's favoured child, the loss of this status with the death of his father, and removal to the 'Bluecoat' school in London. Coleridge's narcissistic depression, flamboyance, and cold-hearted, often cruel, rejection of his family and of loving attachments in general are examined in detail. The author also explores Coleridge's careers in journalism and politics as well as poetry, in his early, heady 'jacobin' days, and later at the heart of the British wartime establishment at Malta. His virtual abandonment of his children and tragic disintegration under the influence of opium are included in the broad sweep of the book which also encompasses an examination of the lives of Coleridge's children, upon whom the manipulations of the father left their destructive mark. Molly Lefebure unravels the enigma that is Coleridge with consummate skill in a book that will bring huge enjoyment to any reader with an interest in the poet's life and times. Molly Lefebure (1919-2013) was a wartime journalist, novelist, children's author, writer on the topography of Cumbria, biographer, and independent scholar and lecturer. She is the author of two other works on the Coleridge family and a volume on the world of Thomas Hardy. Lefebure was secretary to Professor Keith Simpson (1907-1985), the renowned Home Office Pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital, with whom she worked during the Second World War. While surrounded by London's crime, grime and gruesome deaths she wrote a memoire, published as 'Evidence for the Crown' (1955), which formed the basis for the successful television drama, 'Murder on the Home Front' (2013). Having been fascinated by her work in the mortuaries, Lefebure continued at Guy's Hospital and studied drug addiction for six years, which led her to write her first biography of Coleridge ('Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium', 1974). 'Private Lives of the Ancient Mariner' is the distillation of the lifetime's thought of one whom many regard as having been one of the foremost Coleridgean scholars in the world. 'Molly Lefebure's insight into Coleridge's marriage is second to none. Her perception of him as a man and a poet is intellectually formidable. She can be both critical and understanding on the same page. There is a full field of Coleridge scholars at the moment, but in my view Molly was in there first, and is still the outstanding one.' From the Foreword by Melvyn Bragg.

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain of his son's colossal publishing effort and extraordinary scholarship, readers today are therefore able to survey and understand the vastness of the landscape of Tolkien's legendarium. This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on J.R.R. Tolkien's work, his son Christopher's unique gifts in communicating and interpreting that work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. What was Tolkien's intended ending for 'The Lord of the Rings'? Did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience's response to the first ever adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' - a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC's archives? What was the significance of the extraordinary array of doorways which confronted the hobbits as they journeyed through Middle-earth? The book is illustrated with colour reproductions of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts, maps, drawings and letters and, with the kind permission of his estate, photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works, some of which have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans.

Virginia Woolf, figurehead of the Bloomsbury Group and an innovative writer whose experimental style and lyrical prose ensured her position as one of the most influential of modern novelists, was also firmly anchored in the reality of the houses she lived in and those she visited regularly. Detailed and evocative accounts appear in her letters and diaries, as well as in her fiction, where they appear as backdrops or provide direct inspiration. Hilary Macaskill examines the houses that meant the most to Woolf, including: 22 Hyde Park Gate, London - where Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 Talland House, St Ives, Cornwall - the summer home of Virginia's family until 1895 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London - the birthplace of the Bloomsbury Group - Virginia lived here from 1904 to 1912 Hogarth House, Richmond, London - where the newly married Woolfs set up home and founded the Hogarth Press Asheham House, East Sussex - the summer home of the Woolfs, 1912-1919 52 Tavistock Square, London - a return to Bloomsbury, the heart of London Monk's House, Rodmell, East Sussex - where Virginia lived from 1919 until her death in 1941

Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane studies the poetry and polemics of one of the greatest of early modern writers, a poet of immense lyric talent and political importance. The book situates these writings and this writer within the patronage networks and political upheavals of mid seventeenth-century England. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker track Marvell's negotiations among personalities and events; explores his idealizations, attachments, and subversions, and speculate on the meaning of the narratives that he told of himself within his writings -- what they call his 'imagined life'. Hirst and Zwicker draw the figure of an imagined life from the repeated traces Marvell left of lyric yearning and satiric anger, and suggest how these were rooted both in the body and in the imagination.
The book sheds new light on some of Marvell's most familiar poems -- 'Upon Appleton House', 'The Garden', ' To His Coy Mistress', and 'Horatian Ode' -- but at its centre is an extended reading of Marvell's 'The unfortunate Lover', his least familiar and surely most mysterious lyric, and his most sustained narrative of the self. By attending to the lyric, the polemical, and the parliamentary careers together, this book offers a reading, for the first time, of Marvell and his writings as an interpretable whole.

Edmund Spenser's innovative poetic works have a central place in the canon of English literature. Yet he is remembered as a morally flawed, self-interested sycophant; complicit in England's ruthless colonisation of Ireland; in Karl Marx's words, 'Elizabeth's arse-kissing poet'- a man on the make who aspired to be at court and who was prepared to exploit the Irish to get what he wanted. In his vibrant and vivid book, the first biography of the poet for 60 years, Andrew Hadfield finds a more complex and subtle Spenser. How did a man who seemed destined to become a priest or a don become embroiled in politics? If he was intent on social climbing, why was he so astonishingly rude to the good and the great - Lord Burghley, the earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Ralegh, Elizabeth I and James VI? Why was he more at home with 'the middling sort' - writers, publishers and printers, bureaucrats, soldiers, academics, secretaries, and clergymen - than with the mighty and the powerful? How did the appalling slaughter he witnessed in Ireland impact on his imaginative powers? How did his marriage and family life shape his work? Spenser's brilliant writing has always challenged our preconceptions. So too, Hadfield shows, does the contradictory relationship between his between life and his art.

John McGahern was the most admired Irish novelist of the past fifty years. His accessible fiction won him a wide readership throughout Ireland, but the accomplishment of his craft ensured that he also became known as a writer's writer. He set his novels in places he knew intimately-Dublin, London, and the West of Ireland, where he grew up-and became known for the intimacy and honesty of his mapping of home truths of Irish life. His first novel, The Barracks, was widely hailed as a classic on publication in 1963, and his later work, including Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun, and, indeed, Memoir, is built on the stylistic foundation of that novel. The first ten years of McGahern's career were the crucial, for it was during this time that he became an artist. This book explores a young man's discovery of literature. McGahern's youthful realization that books provide both intense pleasure and a spiritual lifeline towards a unique kind of knowledge matured in his twenties. Struggling to overcome desolating experiences in childhood, and abandoning conventional beliefs, he found his anchor in European literary classics. His discovery of how a powerful individual personality could be embedded in novels and stories inspired him. He became an impassioned reader of Proust, Tolstoy, and Flaubert as well as a select few local writers, the poet Patrick Kavanagh and the novelist Michael McLaverty, whose work more closely mirrored his own experience and aspirations. Denis Sampson recreates McGahern's personal and cultural circumstances in Dublin and London in the fifties and early sixties: his absorption of the lives and the work of classic writers; his shrewd observations of those he encountered; his definition of the kind of poetic writer he wished to become. He consider McGahern's first efforts as an apprentice novelist and weaves the inner story of the writing of The Barracks in 1960-62 into a narrative of his imaginative formation. This is an account of McGahern's triumphant emergence from what he called 'my years of training in the secret Dublin years'. In the decades that followed, whilst he experimented in styles and genres, the foundational aspects of his identity as a writer remained constant.

It is so good, after so many years of public indifference, even hostility towards Vincent and his work, to feel towards the end of my life that the battle is won.' JO VAN GOGH-BONGER TO GUSTAVE COQUIOT, 1922 'It is a sacrifice for the sake of Vincent's glory.' JO VAN GOGH-BONGER ON THE SALE OF 'THE SUNFLOWERS' TO THE NATIONAL GALLERY, UK, 1924 Little known but no less influential, Jo van Gogh-Bonger was sister-in-law of Vincent van Gogh, wife of his brother, Theo. When the brothers died soon after each other, she took charge of Van Gogh's artistic legacy and devoted the rest of her life to disseminating his work. Despite being widowed with a young son, Jo successfully navigated the male-dominated world of the art market-publishing Van Gogh's letters, organizing exhibitions in the Netherlands and throughout the world, and making strategic sales to private individuals and influential dealers-ultimately establishing Van Gogh's reputation as one of the finest artists of his generation. In doing so, she fundamentally changed how we view the relationship between the artist and his work. She also lived a rich and fascinating life-not only was she friends with eminent writers and artists, but she also was active within the Social Democratic Labour Party and closely involved in emerging women's movements. Using rich source material, including unseen diaries, documents and letters, Hans Luijten charts the multi-faceted life of this visionary woman with the drive to shake the art world to its core.

Edward Thomas is an important figure in the English literary canon, a major twentieth-century poet, he was also one of England's most experienced and respected Edwardian and Georgian critics, and an observer of the countryside second to none. Although he died at the age of only 39, his prose output was massive and encompassed a range of genres: biography, autobiography, essays, reviews, fiction, nature books, travel writings, and anthologies. While Thomas's stature as a poet is widely appreciated, his prose works have yet to be given their critical due - in large part because scholarly editions have hitherto been lacking. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition shows that Thomas's prose deserves to be much better known, by literary scholars but also the general reading public. This six-volume edition establishes him as one of the most important prose writers in English, who contributed remarkable ideas and representations of the self and community, the landscape and ecology, literature and history, the spiritual and artistic life. It is the definitive edition of Thomas's prose and a significant scholarly resource for the twenty-first century. The second volume contains Thomas's writings on England and Wales, and is mostly concerned with his response to the countryside. It covers the entirety of his writing career, showing the development of his identity and style. Works appear in chronological order within the volume, which begins with a comprehensive introduction, providing biographical details, an account of the circumstances of composition, historical contextualisation of the volume's themes and concerns, and an interpretation based on original research. Thomas's complex and brilliant prose, intricately woven using many quotations and allusions, is elucidated by a detailed headnote at the start of each work, and by extensive annotation.

Dream Song is the story of John Berryman, one of the most gifted poets of a generation that included Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Using Berryman's unpublished letters and poetry, as well as interviews with those who knew him intimately, Paul Mariani captures Berryman's genius and the tragedy that dogged him, while at the same time illuminating one of the most provocative periods in American letters. Here we witness Berryman's struggles with alcohol and drugs, his obsession with women and fame, and his friendships with luminary writers of the century. Mariani creates an unforgettable portrait of a poet who, by the time of his suicide at age fifty-seven, had won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered-as a writer-by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she's since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she's on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential-as the essential-LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. What Hollywood's Eve has going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz." The New York Times "Read Lili Anolik's book in the same spirit you'd read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the writing. Both are extraordinary." Jonathan Lethem "There's no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused, and abused everyone. And then there's Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening-and seductive-as its subject." -Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Hollywood's Eve, equal parts biography and detective story "brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way" (Vogue) and "sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz" (The New York Times).

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.