In Byron's Shadow examines the history of how and why English and American authors projected their own concerns and consciousness onto modern Greece, tracing how the conception of the country evolved from a politicised, feminised, Apollonian space during the Roman era to a carefree Dionysian lotus land in the last decade of Modernism. Author David Roessel draws on a wide range of sources to create a model for literary history that synthesises literary investigation and cultural studies to develop a fuller understanding of the historical forces influencing the Anglo-American conception of modern Greece.

The greatest playwright of the American South, Tennessee Williams used his talent throughout his life to create brief plays exploring many of the themes that dominated his best-known works. Here, thirteen never-before-published one-act dramas reveal some of his most poignant and hilarious characters. From the indefatigable, witty and tough drag queens of And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens to the disheartened poet Mister Paradise, and the extravagant mistress in The Pink Bedroom, these are tales of isolated figures struggling against a cruel world, who refuse to lose sight of their dreams.

Modern Greece constructed by the early nineteenth-century ideals and ideas associated with Byron, has been 'haunted, holy ground' in English and American literature for almost two centuries. In Byron's Shadow analyses how authors employ ideas about romantic nationalism, gender politics, shifts in cultural constructions, and literary experimentation to create variations of Greece to suit changing eras. Complementing and complicating Edward Said's view of relations between East and West, Roessel discusses the way perceptions of modern Greece have been shaped by historical events, arguing that the Greek struggle for independence became a touchstone in the English and American imagination of the nineteenth century, and that twentieth-century Greece became a symbol of the attitudes and ideals that many believed caused the Great War.