Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

Why do we still read and discuss Chaucer? The answer may be simple: he is fun, and he challenges our intelligence and questions our certainties. This collected volume represents an homage to a toweringly great poet, as well as an acknowledgement of the intellectual excitement, challenges, and pleasure that readers owe to him as even today, his poems have the capacity to change the way we engage with fundamental questions of knowledge, understanding, and beauty.

Comic novelist and critic, Paul McDonald, provides an accessible, revealing guide to Joseph Heller's seminal anti-war novel, Catch-22. McDonald succinctly contextualises the book both in relation to the author's life, and key developments in modern American literature. The book offers a thorough summary and analysis of the plot, addresses important characters such as Colonel Cathcart, Milo Minderbinder, Major Major, and Doc Daneeka, and explains the various ways in which Yossarian's hilarious predicament has been interpreted. Among other things it considers Yossarian's status as a mythic hero, an individualist hero, and a postmodern hero, assessing his relevance to contemporary America, and his re-emergence in the sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time, published in 1994. It also offers a descriptive bibliography of important secondary sources, and links to useful online texts. Paul McDonald is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Course Leader for Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton.

Part I provides some contexts for what is inevitably our reading of the history plays, so that perhaps we may guess at the impact they may have had on their contemporaries. The author suggests, by implication, a way of approaching Elizabethan drama that may be generally useful. Part II is a consideration of what the author thinks are some major issues in the Ricardian plays.

The book aims to introduce students (including those with little or no prior experience of the field) to the worlds of Shakespeare and his theatre revealed in Hamlet. It begins by 'Approaching Shakespeare' as utterly a man of the theatre, a professional actor before he was a playwright and a resident dramatist who knew intimately the actors for whom he wrote. It continues by 'Approaching Hamlet' in that light, and as a revenge tragedy deliberately overloaded with complications. The middle chapters look in detail at the 'Actors and Players' of the drama, starting with the Ghost and ending with 'the best actors in the world', and at Shakespeare's favourite 'Acts and Devices' as deployed within it. A final chapter considers Hamlet and Twelfth Night, written and premiered in close succession, as an unexpectedly resonant pair, a surprisingly funny revenge tragedy and a surprisingly bleak revenge comedy that for the first audiences would have complemented one another. The annotated Bibliography includes the current major editions of Hamlet, the major film-adaptations, and a selection of both the best criticism and the most useful websites.