A E Housmans poetry (especially A Shropshire Lad) remains well-known, widely read and often quoted. However, Housman did not view himself as a professional poet, always making quite clear that his proper job was as a Professor of Latin. Housmans fame as a poet has often obscured the fact that he was the leading British classical scholar of his generation, and a Cambridge Professor. It has also sometimes been suggested that Housmans two areas of activity are the sign of a flawed or divided personality. This book argues that there is no fundamental tension between Housman the poet and Housman the scholar, and his career is presented very much as that of a working academic who also wrote poetry. The book gives a full account of what Housman described as the great and real troubles of my early manhood, and in particular his unrequited and life-long love for his undergraduate friend Moses Jackson. It resists the temptation to classify Housman too exclusively as a melancholic, and is sceptical about Housmans reputed rudeness and misanthropy, pointing out that, though Housman was famously aloof in manner, he was notably loyal and generous, courteous in his daily dealings and generally liked by those who knew him. He also possessed a highly developed sense of the absurd and a ready and often disconcerting wit, features which characterised not only his letters and miscellaneous writings, but also, famously, much of his scholarly work.

Margaret Cavendish was one of the most prolific, complex and misunderstood writers of the seventeenth century. A contemporary of Descartes and Hobbes, she was fascinated by philosophical, scientific and imaginative advances, and struggled to overcome the political and cultural obstacles which threatened to stop her engagement with such discourses. Emma Rees examines how Cavendish engaged with the work of thinkers such as Lucretius, Plato, Homer and Harvey in an attempt to write her way out of the exile which threatened not only her intellectual pursuits but her very existence. What emerges is the image of an intelligent, audacious and intrepid early modern woman whose tale will appeal to specialists and general readers alike. -- .

In 1968 Egyptian novelist and political exile Waguih Ghali committed suicide in the London flat of his editor, friend, and sometime lover, Diana Athill. Ghali left behind six notebooks of diaries that for decades were largely inaccessible to the public. An Egyptian in the Swinging Sixties is the first publication of its kind of the journals, casting fascinating light on a likeable and highly enigmatic literary personality.Waguih Ghali (1930?-69), author of the acclaimed novel Beer in the Snooker Club, was a libertine, sponger, and manic depressive, but also an extraordinary writer, a pacifist, and a savvy political commentator. Covering the last four years of his life, Ghali's Diaries offer an exciting glimpse into London's swinging sixties.Moving from West Germany to London and Israel, and back in memory to Egypt and Paris, the entries boast of endless drinking, countless love affairs, and of mingling with the dazzling intellectuals of London, but the Diaries also critique the sinister political circles of Jerusalem and Cairo, describe Ghali's trepidation at being the first Egyptian allowed into Israel after the 1967 War, and confess in detail the pain and difficulties of writing and exile. Including two interviews conducted by Deborah Starr, with celebrated literary editor Diana Athill, OBE, and with Ghali's cousin, former director of UNICEF-Geneva, Samir Basta, the Diaries bring together those most familiar with Ghali's life and work, and offer a fresh take on a distinctive author and a vibrant decade.

Considered one of the best written biographies of all-time, The Life of Samuel Johnson gives insight into the glowing mystique of the prominent English writer. By incorporating key elements from his past and personal relationships, James Boswell creates an extensive narrative of the revered figure. Drawn from Boswell's own journals, the author recounts the life and experiences of Samuel Johnson. He uses his personal connection to investigate Johnson's origin and rise to power. His career is filtered through brief episodes highlighting obstacles and successes alongside his notable peers. It's an intimate record of the celebrated writer and fixture within literary circles. Through his compelling writing, James Boswell successfully illustrates the character and reality of Samuel Johnson. The biography explores his strengths and weaknesses as well as his motivations and fears. Boswell's input is crucial to the story structure, delivering an informative and impactful narrative. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson is both modern and readable.

Follow in the footsteps of some of the world's most famous authors on the journeys which inspired their greatest works in this beautiful illustrated atlas. Some truly remarkable works of literature have been inspired by writers spending time away from their typical surroundings. From epic road trips and arduous treks into remote territories to cultural tours and sojourns in the finest hotels, this book explores 35 influential journeys taken by literary greats and reveals the repercussions of those travels on the authors' personal lives and the broader literary landscape. Award-winning author Travis Elborough brings each of these trips to life with fascinating insights into the stories behind the creation of some of the world's most famous literary creations, including Dracula, Moby Dick, Murder on the Orient Express, Madame Bovary, The Talented Mr Ripley and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. From Herman Melville's first whaling voyage in 1841, from New York to Liverpool, to Jack Kerouac's on-the-road Odyssey, which is now an iconic drive, discover how these journeys imprinted themselves on some of the greatest literary minds of all time. Complete with navigational notes, colour photographs and commissioned maps, the fresh insights within tell readers something new about the places, work and personalities of some of the world's greatest minds.

Bill Bryson's biography of William Shakespeare unravels the superstitions, academic discoveries and myths surrounding the life of our greatest poet and playwright. Ever since he took the theatre of Elizabethan London by storm over 400 years ago, Shakespeare has remained centre stage. His fame stems not only from his plays - performed everywhere from school halls to the world's most illustrious theatres - but also from his enigmatic persona. His face is familiar to all, yet in reality very little is known about the man behind the masterpieces. Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard - from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died. Taking us on a journey through the streets of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Bryson examines centuries of stories, half-truths and downright lies surrounding our greatest dramatist. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, he introduces a host of engaging characters, as he celebrates the magic of Shakespeare's language and delights in details of the bard's life, folios, poetry and plays.

On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, C.S. Lewis was commemorated in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, taking his place beside the greatest names in English literature. Oxford and Cambridge Universities, where Lewis taught, also held celebrations of his life. This volume gathers together addresses from those events into a single anthology. Rowan Williams and Alister McGrath assess Lewis's legacy in theology, Malcolm Guite addresses his integration of reason and imagination, William Lane Craig takes a philosophical perspective, while Lewis's successor as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, Helen Cooper, considers him as a critic. Others contribute their more personal and creative responses: Walter Hooper, Lewis's biographer, recalls their first meeting; there are poems, essays, a panel discussion, and even a report by the famous 'Mystery Worshipper' from the Ship of Fools website, along with a moving recollection by Royal Wedding composer Paul Mealor about how he set one of Lewis's poems to music. Containing theology, literary criticism, poetry, memoir, and much else, this volume reflects the breadth of Lewis's interests and the astonishing variety of his own output: a diverse and colourful commemoration of an extraordinary man.

In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. These range from travel journals, letters, and classic literary staples such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to rarely read masterpieces such as The Master of Ballantrae or The Ebb-Tide. While much recent scholarship on Stevenson foregrounds geography, the present volume also examines the theme of movement across memory, time, and generic boundaries. Taken together, the essays offer a view of Stevenson that demonstrates how the protean nature of his literary output reflects the radical developments in science, technology, and culture that characterized the age in which he lived.

'Invention ... does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos' - Mary Shelley In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein's creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has become literary legend. In this book, Daisy Hay returns to the objects and manuscripts of the novel's genesis in order to assemble its story anew. Frankenstein was inspired by the extraordinary people surrounding the eighteen-year-old author and by the places and historical dramas that formed the backdrop of her youth. Featuring manuscripts, portraits, illustrations and artefacts, The Making of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein explores the novel's time and place, its people, the relics of its long afterlife and the notebooks in which it was created. Hay strips Frankenstein back to its constituent parts revealing an uneven novel written by a young woman deeply engaged in the process of working out what she thought about the pressing issues of her time: science, politics, religion, slavery, maternity, the imagination, creativity and community. This is a compelling and innovative biography of the novel for all those fascinated by its essential, brilliant chaos.

"A richly rewarding, insightful, and engaging study."
--"American Literary Realism"

"Glass provides a novel, nuanced, and sound critical perspectives on the productive interaction of seemingly opposite forces: modernism and the mass market."--"Choice"

"Glass offers insightful readings of such books as Stein's "Everybody's Autobiography"(1937) and Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon" (1932)."
--"The Journal of American History"

"A fascinating exploration of the relationship among modern authorial celebrity, the rise of the mass market, and the crisis of masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. This crisply argued book unites sophisticated theoretical arguments about the changing shape of subjectivity in American culture with attentive literary readings and careful historical scholarship."
--Janice Radway, Duke University

"Provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. A smart and combelling book that has broken through the silence on literary celebrity, and it will serve as the foundation for other inquiries into this complex phenomenon."
--"The Hemingway Review"

The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed.

Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuseson how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship.

By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

The Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson achieved worldwide fame as the creator of the Moomin stories, written between 1945 and 1970 and still in print in more than twenty languages. However, the Moomins were only a part of her prodigious output. Already admired in Nordic art circles as a painter, cartoonist and illustrator, she would go on to write a series of classic novels and short stories. She remains Scandinavia's best loved author.

Tove Jansson's work reflected the tenets of her life: her love of family (and special bond with her mother), of nature, and her insistence on freedom to pursue her art. Love and work was the motto she chose for herself and her approach to both was joyful and uncompromising. If her relationships with men foundered on her ambivalence towards marriage, those with women came as a revelation, especially the love and companionship she found with her long-time partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she lived on the solitary island of Klovharu.

In this meticulously researched, authorised biography, Boel Westin draws together the many threads of Jansson's life: from the studies interrupted to help her family; the dark shades of war and her emergence as an artist with a studio of her own; to the years of Moomin-mania, and later novel writing. Based on numerous conversations with Tove, and unprecedented access to her journals, letters and personal archives, Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words offers a rare and privileged insight into the world of a writer whom Philip Pullman described, simply, as 'a genius'.

"Rewriting" in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as "rewriting history" or "rewriting canonical texts." By shifting the focus to how Caribbean writers return to their own works in order to rework them, this book offers theoretical considerations to postcolonial studies on "literariness" in relation to the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean writers have subjected their own literary texts. Focusing specifically on Franketienne, this book offers an overview of how the defining aesthetic and thematic components of Franketienne's major works have emerged over the course of his forty-year writing career. It reveals the marked development of key notions guiding his literary creation since the 1960s, and demonstrates that rewriting illustrates the central aesthetic of the Spiral which has always shaped his oeuvre. It is, the book argues, the constantly moving form of the Spiral which Franketienne explores through his constant reworking of his previously written texts. Franketienne and Rewriting negotiates between the literary and material ends of the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies, arguing that literary characteristics in Franketienne connect with changing political, social, economic, and cultural circumstances in the Haiti he rewrites.

The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach to Sylvia Plath studies focusing on the readers of Sylvia Plath rather than the historical figure herself. Working from the premise that Plath is a highly visible cultural figure, this book explores why her readers become so attached to her. Why does she have such a large and devoted following? What is it about her that attracts people, and once they are drawn in, how does this fandom manifest itself? This book is based on primary research carried out by the author who has collected stories and accounts from readers of Plath and explores key areas such as the first encounter with Plath, ways in which fans feel they 'double' with Plath, pilgrimages that they make to places where she lived and worked, how they interact with images of Plath and how they respond to objects owned by Plath. This study is unique. There is currently no other book that deals with this subject. As such, The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath offers a fascinating and original approach not only to Plath scholarship but to the increasing body of literature on fandom studies.

The perfect gift for fans of All Creatures Great and Small, this is a charming collection of classic stories from James Herriot's much-loved books with insights into his life and work from his children Rosie and Jim. With astute observations and boundless humour, country vet Herriot captures the spirit of the Yorkshire Dales and of rural communities on the cusp of change, before tractors and machines had taken over and modern medicines and antibiotics transformed veterinary work. Along the way a beloved cast of characters emerges, from the squabbling brothers Tristan and Siegfried to Herriot's hapless courtship and eventual family life with Helen Anderson. But it's the animals which are at the heart of Herriot's stories. Whether he's dodging a raging bull on a risky artificial insemination assignment, becoming pen pals with Tricki Woo the spoilt Pikingese or the inevitable trials and tribulations of lambing season, there's never a dull moment in Herriot's company. At times moving and often laugh-out-loud funny, The Wonderful World of James Herriot will delight fans old and new.

Writers and alcohol have long been associated-for some, the association becomes unmanageable. Drawing on rare sources, this collection of brief biographies traces the lives of 13 well known literary drinkers, examining how their relationship with alcohol developed and how it affected their work, for better or worse. Focusing on examples like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski and Raymond Carver, the combined biographies present a study of the classic figure of the over-indulging author.

Longtime fans of Rich's writing will welcome this engaging and thoughtful biography of her life. There is also a wonderful section that includes many of Rich's essays and stories -- which were published in magazines but never appeared in book form -- as well as excerpts from her journal and letters.

A genius of literary suspense, known to millions as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Based on a wealth of previously undiscovered correspondence and dozens of interviews, Shirley Jackson reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author, firmly placing Jackson within the American Gothic tradition.

America s Literary Legends is a concise, yet truly distinctive and comprehensive review of 50 authors and poets who shaped American literature from the 1600s through the mid-twentieth century. Fully grounded in sound literary and historical scholarship, this anthology takes a fresh approach to the lives and burial places of the greatest authors of American literature. It includes such masters as Irving, Poe, Whitman, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and features introductions to each time period with an overview of the historical, cultural, and literary background of the era. Through succinct and engaging biographies, extensive descriptive observations, and 200 photographs, these great writers come to life. Innovative and authoritative, America s Literary Legends embodies a fresh approach to the study of American literature and the authors whose works have become classics."

An Irish Times and The i Book of 2022 'Tense and intimate . . . an education' - Geoff Dyer 'Enriching, sobering and at times heartrending. A wonder' - Sir Lenny Henry 'Authentic, fascinating and deeply moving' - Terry Waite __________ Can someone in prison be more free than someone outside? Would we ever be good if we never felt shame? What makes a person worthy of forgiveness? Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation. When Andy steps into a prison, he also confronts his inherited shame: his father, uncle and brother all spent time behind bars. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his. As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, he searches for his own form of freedom too. Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable memoir. Through a blend of storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, it offers a new insight into our stretched justice system, our failing prisons and the complex lives being lived inside. __________ 'Inspiring' - The Observer 'Strives with humour and compassion to understand the phenomenon of prison' - Sydney Review of Books 'Expands both heart and mind' - Ciaran Thapar 'A fascinating and enlightening journey . . . A legitimate page-turner' - 3AM

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Ernest Hemingway embraced adventure and courted glamorous friends while writing articles, novels, and short stories that captivated the world. Hemingway's personal relationships and experiences influenced the content of his fiction, while the progression of places where the author chose to live and work shaped his style and rituals of writing. Whether revisiting the Italian front in A Farewell to Arms, recounting a Pamplona bull run in The Sun Also Rises, or depicting a Cuban fishing village in The Old Man and the Sea, setting played an important part in Hemingway's fiction. The author also drew on real people-parents, friends, and fellow writers, among others-to create memorable characters in his short stories and novels. In Influencing Hemingway: The People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work Nancy W. Sindelar introduces the reader to the individuals who played significant roles in Hemingway's development as both a man and as an artist-as well as the environments that had a profound impact on the author's life. In words and photos, readers will see images of Hemingway the child, the teenager, and the aspiring author-as well as the troubled legend dealing with paranoia and fear. The book begins with Hemingway's birth and early influences in Oak Park, Illinois, followed by his first job as a reporter in Kansas City. Sindelar then recounts Hemingway's experiences and adventures in Italy, France, Spain, Key West, Florida, and Cuba, all of which found their way into his writing. The book concludes with an analysis of the events that preceded the author's suicide in Idaho and reflects on the influences critics had on his life and work. Though much has been written about the life and work of the Nobel prize-winning author, Influencing Hemingway is the first publication to carefully document-in photographs and letters-the individuals and locales that inspired him. Featuring more than 60 photos, many of which will be new to the general and academic reader, and unguarded statements from personal letters to and from his parents, lovers, wives, children, and friends, this unique biography allows readers to see Hemingway from a new perspective.

Johnson rose from obscure origins to become a major literary figure of the eighteenth century. Through a detailed survey of his major works and political journalism, Hudson constructs a complex picture of Johnson as a moralist forced to accept the realistic nature of politics during an era of revolutionary transition.