Volumes IV and V of the Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, which complete the edition, contain all of his dramatic writing in verse. Hardy was Hardy was interested in dramatic verse all his adult life; before he wrote his first novel he considered writing plays in blank verse, and during the thirty years of his novel-writing career he entered in his notebooks many schemes for a vast poetic drama of England's wars with Napoleon. But it was not until after he had turned from fiction to poetry, in the 1890s, that he actually began to work on a poetic drama. The Dynasts was written between 1902 and 1907; the Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall was began in 1916 and completed in 1923.
In addition to the two major dramas this volume includes Hardy's versions of two folk-pieces: the Mummers'Play of 'Saint George'and the rustic operetta O'Jan. O'Jan, O'Jan'(here published for the first time). Textual annotations, together with a full account of the rough draft of Part Third of The Dynasts, make it possible for the reader to follow the history of the composition of Hardy's epic drama in unusual detail. Explanatory notes to each of the dramatic works describe its composition and publication, and provide supporting material from Hardy's letters and notebooks. Appendices add further information on the production and performance of these works.

Volumes IV and V of the Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, which complete the edition, contain all of his dramatic writing in verse. Hardy was interested in verse drama all his adult life; before he wrote his first novel he considered writing plays in blank verse, and during the thirty years of his novel-writing career he entered in his notebooks many schemes for a vast poetic drama of England's wars with Napoleon. But is was not until after he had turned from fiction to poetry, in the 1890s, that he actually began to work on a poetic drama. The Dynasts was written between 1902 and 1907; The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall was begun in 1916 and completed in 1923. In addition to the two major dramas these volumes include Hardy's versions of two folk-pieces: the Mummers' Play of Saint George' and the rustic operetta O Jan, O Jan, O Jan' (here published for the first time). Textual annotations, together with a full account of the rough draft of Part Third of The Dynasts, make it possible for the reader to follow the history of the composition of Hardy's epic drama in unusual detail. Explanatory notes to each of the dramatic works describe its composition and publication, and provide supporting material from Hardy's letters and notebooks.

The Soldiers? Tale is the story of modern wars as told by the men who did the actual fighting. Hynes examines the journals, memoirs, and letters of men who fought in the two World Wars and in Vietnam, and also the wars fought against the weak and helpless in concentration camps, prisoner-of-war camps, and bombed cities. Interweaving his own reflections on war with brilliantly chosen passages from soldiers? accounts, he offers vivid answers to the question we all ask of men who have fought: What was it like? In these powerful pages the experiences of modern war, which seem unimaginable to those who weren?t there, become comprehensible and real. The wide range of writers examined includes both famous literary memoirists like Robert Graves, Tim O?Brien, and Elie Wiesel, and unknown soldiers who wrote only their war stories. Using these testimonies, Hynes considers each war in terms of its special circumstances and its effects on men who fought. His understanding of the psychology of warfare--and of each war?s role in history--gives this study its intellectual authority; the voices of the men who were there, and wrote about what they saw and felt, give it its powerful dramatic impact.

Writing her first novel during World War I, West examines the relationship between three women and a soldier suffering from shell-shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.

"In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers metaphors for those other antagonisms, the private battles of our private lives, our conflicts with one another and with the world, and with ourselves." Samuel Hynes knows war personally: he served as a Marine Corps pilot in the Pacific Theater during World War II, receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross. He has spent his life balancing two careers: pilot and professor of literature. Hynes has written a number of major works of literary criticism, as well as a war-memoir, Flights of Passage, and several books about the World Wars. His writing is sharp, lucid, and has provided some of the most expert, detailed, and empathetic accounts of a disappearing generation of fighters and writers. On War and Writing offers for the first time a selection of Hynes's essays and introductions that explore the traditions of war writing from the twentieth century to the present. Hynes takes as a given that war itself--the battlefield uproar of actual combat--is unimaginable for those who weren't there, yet we have never been able to turn away from it. We want to know what war is really like: for a soldier on the Somme; a submariner in the Pacific; a bomber pilot over Germany; a tank commander in the Libyan desert. To learn, we turn again and again to the memories of those who were there, and to the imaginations of those who weren't, but are poets, or filmmakers, or painters, who give us a sense of these experiences that we can't possibly know. The essays in this book range from the personal (Hynes's experience working with documentary master Ken Burns, his recollections of his own days as a combat pilot) to the critical (explorations of the works of writers and artists such as Thomas Hardy, e. e. cummings, and Cecil Day Lewis). What we ultimately see in On War and Writing is not military history, not the plans of generals, but the feelings of war, as young men expressed them in journals and poems, and old men remembered them in later years--men like Samuel Hynes.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) remains one of the best loved of the great English poets. Hardy thought of himself as a poet all his life, although his poetic career only flowered after he had retired from novel-writing in his mid-fifties. Over the next thirty years he wrote the poems that have established him as one of the great and most enduringly popular English poets of the twentieth century. His verse touches all the common themes of human existence: birth, childhood, love, marriage, ageing, death. If Hardy's age brings anything to them, it is an old man's ironic and elegiac sense that in life hopes are likely to be defeated and losses sustained, and that the world was not designed for human happiness. This collection is prepared by Samuel Hynes, editor of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, and selected from the Oxford Authors critical edition. The introduction and notes illuminate Hardy's central place in the tradition of English poetry. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This book is intended for hardy scholars and enthusiasts.

Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg, a British journalist and professional writer who became an important philosopher and critic in the 1930's, author of Illusion and Reality and Studies in a Dying Culture. In the mid-thirties Caudwell joined the Communist Party; he died in 1937 in the defense of Madrid, leaving the manuscript of Romance and Realism unpublished. This short but comprehensive book is a Marxist interpretation of English literature from Shakespeare to Spender. The author follows the course of English history-the end of feudalism, the age of exploration, the rise of the common man, industrialization, science- producing his particular synthesis of literature as a subjective experience (romance) and as a response to society (realism). The major writers and movements of English literature are discussed, often with brilliant observations. Romance and Realism is important as Marxist criticism, as a reflection of the acrid definitions of the writers of the thirties (including Auden, Orwell, C. Day Lewis), and as the highly personal view of a talented critic. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg, a British journalist and professional writer who became an important philosopher and critic in the 1930's, author of Illusion and Reality and Studies in a Dying Culture. In the mid-thirties Caudwell joined the Communist Party; he died in 1937 in the defense of Madrid, leaving the manuscript of Romance and Realism unpublished. This short but comprehensive book is a Marxist interpretation of English literature from Shakespeare to Spender. The author follows the course of English history-the end of feudalism, the age of exploration, the rise of the common man, industrialization, science- producing his particular synthesis of literature as a subjective experience (romance) and as a response to society (realism). The major writers and movements of English literature are discussed, often with brilliant observations. Romance and Realism is important as Marxist criticism, as a reflection of the acrid definitions of the writers of the thirties (including Auden, Orwell, C. Day Lewis), and as the highly personal view of a talented critic. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Unsubstantial Air is a chronicle of war that is more than a military history; it traces the lives and deaths of the young Americans who fought in the skies over Europe in World War I. Using letters, journals, and memoirs, it speaks in their voices and answers primal questions: What was it like to be there? What was it like to fly those planes, to fight, to kill? The volunteer fliers were often privileged young men. The sort of college athletes and Ivy League students who might appear in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and sometimes did. For them, a war in the air would be like a college reunion. Others were roughnecks from farms and ranches, for whom it would all be strange. Together they would make one Air Service and fight one bitter, costly war. A wartime pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes tells these young men's saga as the story of a generation. He shows how they dreamed of adventure and glory, and how they learned the realities of a pilot's life, the hardships and the danger, and how they came to know both the beauty of flight and the constant presence of death. They gasp in wonder at the world seen from a plane, struggle to keep their hands from freezing in open-air cockpits, party with actresses and aristocrats, and search for their friends' bodies on the battlefield. Their romantic war becomes more than that, it becomes a harsh but often thrilling new reality.

The pattern in Hardy's poetry is the eternal conflict between irreconcilables that was, for him, the first principle, and indeed the only principle, of universal order. Hynes analyzes this pattern as it is manifested in the philosophical context of the poems, their structure, diction, and imagery. Originally published in 1961. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

A memoir by a WWI fighter pilot, with the adventurous spirit of "War Horse" and the charm of "The Little Prince"
A singular, lyrical book, "Sagittarius Rising" is at once an exuberant memoir from the Lost Generation and a riveting tale of the early days of flight during World War I. Cecil Lewis lied his way into the British Army's Royal Flying Corps at age sixteen and was ordered to a squadron on the Western Front only a year later. At the time, flying was so new that designers hadn't even decided on basic mechanics such as how many wings a plane should have. Despite this, Lewis mastered virtually every kind of single-engine plane in the RFC, going on to excel in active duty and even to dogfight the Red Baron--and live to tell the tale. Full of infectious charm and written with the prose and pacing of a novel, "Sagittarius Rising" beautifully recounts Lewis's harrowing exploits in the sky alongside his wild times of partying and chasing girls while on leave in London. His coming-of-age story is unlike any other WWI memoir you've read before.

Raven is an ugly man dedicated to ugly deeds. His cold-blooded killing of a European Minister of War is an act of violence with chilling repercussions, not just for Raven himself but for the nation as a whole. The money he receives in payment for the murder is made up of stolen notes and when the first of these is traced, Raven becomes a man on the run. As he tracks down the agent who has been double-crossing him and attempts to elude the police, he becomes both hunter and hunted: an unwitting weapon of a strange kind of social justice. In doing so, he sets the stage for Greene's next novel, Brighton Rock. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Samuel Hynes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

He was a wide-eyed teenager when he left his Minnesota home in 1943 to learn to fly. By the end of World War II, he was a battle-worn Marine bomber pilot who'd survived more than a hundred missions in the Pacific. With stunning eloquence and breathtaking clarity, Samuel Hynes recalls those extraordinary years: the madness of war and the horror of death, the friendships forged in cockpits and gin mills, the wives and sweethearts left at home, and the wonder of flying—that exquisite harmony between pilot and machine aloft in the insubstantial air. More than a combat tale, this is the story of one man's remarkable rite of passage in that timeless world of innocence gone to war.