In the autumn of 1873, Wilkie Collins followed the example of fellow literary celebrities Dickens and Thackeray, and began a six-month reading tour of America. This book places this tour within the American lyceum movement of the later nineteenth century.

John Thelwall was a Romantic and Enlightenment polymath. In 1794 he was tried and acquitted of high treason, earning himself the disdainful soubriquet 'acquitted felon' from Secretary of State for War, William Windham. Later, Thelwall's interests turned to poetry and plays, and was a collaborator and confidant of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope (16881744) in relation to the political issues of his time.

Existing accounts of Fielding's political ideas are insufficiently aware of the structure of politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and of the ways in which Whig political ideology developed following the Revolution of 1688. This political biography explains and illustrates what 'being a Whig' meant to Fielding.

George Orwell remains an iconic figure today - even though he died in 1950. His dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a Big Brother society in which the state intrudes into the most intimate details of people's lives - and, not surprisingly, it became a constant reference point after Edward Snowden's revelations. The word "Orwellian" is constantly in the media - used either as a pejorative adjective to evoke totalitarian terror or as a complimentary adjective to mean "displaying outspoken intellectual honesty". Interest in Orwell's life and writings - globally - continues unabated. Beginning with a preface by Richard Blair, Orwell's son, George Orwell Now! brings together thirteen chapters by leading international scholars in four thematic sections: * Peter Marks on Orwell and the history of surveillance studies; Florian Zollmann on Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2014; Henk Vynckier on Orwell's collecting project; and Adam Stock on 'Big Brother's Literary Offspring' * Paul Anderson "In Defence of Bernard Crick"; Luke Seaber on the "London Section of Down and Out in Paris and London"; John Newsinger on "Orwell's Socialism"; and Philip Bounds on "Orwell and the Anti-Austerity Left in Britain" * Marina Remy on the "Writing of Otherness in Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying"; Sreya Mallika Datta and Utsa Mukherjee on "Reassessing Ambivalence in Orwell's Burma"; and Shu-chu Wei on Orwell's Animal Farm alongside Chen Jo-his's Mayor Yin * Tim Crook on "Orwell and the Radio Imagination"; and editor Richard Lance Keeble on "Orwell and the War Reporter's Imagination" Peter Stansky, in an afterword, argues that Orwell is now more relevant than ever before.

Met Adam Small se oorlye op 25 Junie 2016 het daar ’n einde gekom aan die lewe van ’n unieke mens en ’n unieke oeuvre: ’n digter, dramaturg en denker met besonderse insig in die aktualiteite van sy tyd. Hoewel die toekenning van die Hertzogprys aan Small in 2012 en die gepaardgaande publisiteit daarrondom die idee vir ’n huldigingsbundel by die SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns laat ontstaan het, was dit Small se dood wat die deurslag gegee het om die publikasie te verwesenlik: Wanneer ’n kunstenaar sterf en sy stem vir ewig verstom het, bied dit immers die geleentheid om oorkoepelend oor die geheel van sy kunstenaarskap te besin. Die bydraes in hierdie bundel dra die ondertoon van ’n afsluiting, ’n terugblik op die mens en kunstenaar Adam Small, met temas soos die toekoms van Afrikaans en die Afrikaanse letterkunde, die uitbreidende rol van Kaaps, en sosiale vraagstukke soos bendegeweld en armoede. Mense wat Small van naby geken het is hier aan die woord saam met literatore en kollegas uit die maatskaplikewerk-omgewing waarby Small lewenslank betrokke was. Adam Small: Denker, digter, dramaturg – ’n Huldiging hoef nie as afsluiting van die gesprek oor Small se lewe en werk beskou te word nie – inteendeel: Dit bied juis ook geleentheid om die oorkoepelende blik oor Small se kunstenaarskap as inleiding tot verdere ondersoek te benut.

First published in 1957, Mazo de la Roche's last autobiography is a vivid look at her life in Ontario, and a parting shot at her critics. Mazo de la Roche was once Canada's best-known writer, loved by millions of readers around the world. Her Jalna series is filled with unforgettable characters who come to life for her readers, but she herself was secretive about her own life and tried to escape the public attention fame brought. In this memoir, de la Roche describes her childhood and her relationship with her cousin and life-long companion, Caroline Clement. She confesses her personal connection with her troubled character Finch Whiteoak and details her romantic struggles. Ringing the Changes is the closest view we have of Mazo de la Roche's innermost thoughts and the private life she usually kept hidden.

Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America.

Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot's poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot's friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot's Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot's poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences.

Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century.

After twenty-six-year-old author Breece D'J Pancake took his own life in April 1979, the West Virginian's posthumously published short-story collection made a considerable impact on the world of letters. His work was praised for a controlled muscular style reminiscent of Hemingway, for its strong undercurrent of emotion, and for its evocation of the blighted lives of the mountain poor. In A Room Forever, Thomas E. Douglass offers a detailed portrait of Pancake's short life, examining the varied circumstances and emotional forces that led to the writer's suicide and exploring Pancake's influence on contemporary fiction generally and Appalachian writing in particular.Drawing on notebooks, letters, and manuscripts left by Pancake as well as numerous conversations and interviews with family, friends, and others, Douglass has recreated the key events of the young artist's life: his West Virginia childhood, his romantic losses, his education as a writer at the University of Virginia, and the acceptance of his work by the East Coast literary establishment. Through analysis of the story fragments reproduced in this volume, including The Conqueror and Shouting Victory, Douglass illustrates the recurring themes -- such as fear of failure and the inability to escape disaster -- that Pancake expressed so eloquently in his work, and he shows their origins in the writer's own personal history.Douglass examines the degree to which Pancake drew on his memories of life in Appalachia and discusses Pancake's influence on other Appalachian writers such as Pinckney Benedict. Douglass argues that Pancake's posthumous collection, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, brought a renewed interest inregional writing to the national literary scene. A Room Forever brings to life the artistic sensibility and inner turmoil of a legendary figure in contemporary southern letters.

It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark's most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spark describes her childhood in 1930s Edinburgh in brief, dazzling anecdotes. In one she recalls a cherished schoolteacher, Christina Kay, who would later be used as the prototype for Miss Jean Brodie. Spark boldly details her disastrous first marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.) - himself thirty-two, she just nineteen - whom she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and left behind to return to England. In the midst of WWII, Spark took a bizarre position working in the disinformation campaign of the British Secret Service, eliciting information from German POWs to combat Nazi propaganda. She later moved to the Poetry Society of London, where she mingled with literati and other intellectuals, befriended by some (such as Graham Greene, an early supporter of her work) and sparring with others. We experience Spark's joy with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, her trials with other writers' envy, and her emergence as the most brilliant femme fatale of 20th-century English literature.

Originally published in 1969. In the seventeenth century neither the literary genre nor the term 'autobiography' existed but we see in seventeenth-century literature many kinds of autobiographical writings, to which their authors gave such titles as 'Journal of the Life of Me, Confessions, etc. This work is a study of nearly two hundred of these, published and unpublished, which together represent a very varied group of writings. The book begins with an examination of the rise of autobiography as a genre during the Renaissance. It discusses seventeenth-century autobiographical writings under two main headings - 'religious', where the autobiographies are grouped according to the denomination of their writer, and 'secular', where a wide variety of writings is examined, including accounts of travel and of military and political life, as well as more personal accounts. Autobiographies by women are treated separately, and the author shows that they in general have a deeper revelation of sentiments and more subtle self-analyses than is found in comparable works by men. Sources and influences are recorded and also the essential historical details of each work. This book gives a critical analysis of the autobiographies as literary works and suggests relationships between them and the culture and society of their time. Review of the original publication: "...a contribution to cultural history which is of quite exceptional merit. Its subject is of great intrinsic interest and manifest importance and Professor Delany has treated it with exemplary thoroughness, lucidity, and intelligence." Lionel Trilling

Presented in two volumes, The Ashgate Research Companion to The Sidneys, 1500-1700 assesses the current state of scholarship on members of the Sidney family and their impact, as historical and/or literary figures, in the period 1500-1700. Volume 2: Literature, begins with an exploration of the Sidneys' books and manuscripts and how they circulated, followed by an overview of the contributions of family members -Sir Philip Sidney; Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Lady Mary Wroth; Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke - in the genres of prose romance, drama, poetry, psalms and prose. These essays outline major controversies and areas for further research, as well as conducting literary analysis.

Josephine Pinckney (1895--1957) was an award-winning, best-selling author whose work critics frequently compared to that of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Isak Dinesen. Her flair for storytelling and trenchant social commentary found expression in poetry, five novels -- Three O'Clock Dinner was the most successful -- stories, essays, and reviews. Pinckney belonged to a distinguished South Carolina family and often used Charleston as her setting, writing in the tradition of Ellen Glasgow by blending social realism with irony, tragedy, and humor in chronicling the foibles of the South's declining upper class. Barbara L. Bellows has produced the first biography of this very private woman and emotionally complex writer, whose life story is also the history of a place and time -- Charleston in the first half of the twentieth century.

In A Talent for Living, Pinckney's life unfolds like a novel as she struggles to escape aristocratic codes and the ensnaring bonds of southern ladyhood and to embrace modern freedoms. In 1920, with DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen, she founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, which helped spark the southern literary renaissance. Her home became a center of intellectual activity with visitors such as the poet Amy Lowell, the charismatic presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, and the founding editor of theSaturday Review of Literature Henry Seidel Canby. Sophisticated and cosmopolitan, she absorbed popular contemporary influences, particularly that of Freudian psychology, even as she retained an almost Gothic imagination shaped in her youth by the haunting, tragic beauty of the Low Country and its mystical Gullah culture.

A skilled stylist, Pinckney excelled in creating memorable characters, but she never scripted an individual as engaging or intriguing as herself. Bellows offers a fascinating, exhaustively researched portrait of this onetime cultural icon and her well-concealed personal life.

"Letters of E. B. White" touches on a wide variety of subjects, including the "New Yorker" editor who became the author's wife; their dachshund, Fred, with his "look of fake respectability"; and White's contemporaries, from Harold Ross and James Thurber to Groucho Marx and John Updike and, later, Senator Edmund S. Muskie and Garrison Keillor. Updated with newly released letters from 1976 to 1985, additional photographs, and a new foreword by John Updike, this unparalleled collection of letters from one of America's favorite essayists, poets, and storytellers now spans nearly a century, from 1908 to 1985.

LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A book like no other - the tale of a gripping quest to discover the identity of history's most notorious murderer and a literary high-wire act from the legendary writer and director of Withnail and I. For over a hundred years, 'the mystery of Jack the Ripper' has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists, and endless volumes purporting finally to reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorised Victorian England. But what if there was never really any 'mystery' at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? In THEY ALL LOVE JACK, the award-winning film director and screenwriter Bruce Robinson exposes the cover-up that enabled one of history's most notorious serial killers to remain at large. More than twelve years in the writing, this is much more than a radical reinterpretation of the Jack the Ripper legend, and an enthralling hunt for the killer. A literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption. Polemic, forensic investigation, panoramic portrait of an age, underpinned by deep scholarship and delivered in Robinson's inimitably vivid and scabrous prose, THEY ALL LOVE JACK is an absolutely riveting and unique book, demolishing the theories of generations of self-appointed experts - the so-called 'Ripperologists' - to make clear, at last, who really did it; and more importantly, how he managed to get away with it for so long.

A candid account of Patricia Schonstein’s creative, deeply lived life as a novelist.

Annotated with extracts from her writings, this generous memoir welcomes you behind the scenes, into her Workshop and Costumery.

She shows how her own life configures with the scaffolding of her fictions; how characters take up roles both archetypal and simple to tackle existential questions; and how urban landscapes and wilderness serve as the neon-spangled theatres of her story telling.

In a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America's celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children. In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist's gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.

Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.