This Reader's Guide charts the reception history of Ted Hughes' poetry from his first to last published collection, culminating in posthumous tributes and assessments of his lifetime achievement. Sandie Byrne explores the criticism relating to key issues such as nature, myth, the Laureateship, and Hughes' relationship with Sylvia Plath.

Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.

Tony Harrison: Loiner is published to celebrate the poet and playwright Tony Harrison's sixtieth birthday through an exploration of his work, including his best-known poem v.. Harrison (1937- ) has been called `our best English poet', and has been awarded a number of prizes for his poetry, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Royal Television Society Award, the Prix Italia, and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. This book gives his work the serious critical attention it merits, with essays from a number of prominent contributors, including Richard Eyre and Melvyn Bragg, and a foreword by Grey Gowrie. The collection ranges from personal recollections of working with Tony Harrison and personal responses to his poems, to detailed critical analyses of his techniques and themes, covering Harrison's short poems and sonnet sequence, his plays, his television poem-films, and his libretti, spanning the years 1955-1997. A `loiner' is a native of Leeds, where Tony Harrison was born and spent the early part of his life, and from which he was dispossessed by the enforced translation of the state scholarship system. The word also connotes other aspects of Tony Harrison: the `loins' of his poetry-its energy and physicality-and the `loners' who are its main protagonists-men and women dispossessed of their class, nation, language, and identity. At sixty, Harrison is at his poetic peak, producing plays, film-scripts, libretti, journalistic responses to social and national strife, impassioned speeches of love and outrage-always in poetry. Tony Harrison: Loiner introduces the major themes and forms of our most exciting and cosmopolitan as well as technically accomplished poet, and reassesses his achievement and place in twentieth-century literature.

Saki is the acknowledged master of the short story. His writing is elegant, economical, and witty, its tone worldly, flippant irreverence delivered in astringent exchanges and epigrams more neat, pointed, and poised even than Wilde's. The deadpan narrative voice allows for the unsentimental recitation of horrors and the comically grotesque, and the generation of guilty laughter at some very un-pc statements.
Saki's short stories have been much reprinted as well as adapted for radio, stage, and television, but his novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came, are almost unknown, his journalism and travel writing forgotten, and his plays rarely performed. Sandie Byrne argues that his reputation has been unfairly overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary George Bernard Shaw, and successors P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.
In a well-meaning introduction to the Penguin Complete Saki, Noel Coward reinforced the received image of Saki's work as celebrating an Edwardian or even Victorian milieu of privilege, luxury, and affectation; comedies of manners and light satire. Byrne shows that Saki's writing was no nostalgic evocation of a lost golden age, and that he was rarely concerned with the charm and delight Coward describes. His preoccupations were with England, the values of Empire, and the dangerous beauty of the feral ephebe. The threat to the first two of these triggered his alleged metamorphosis from cosmopolitan cynic and dandy-about-town to patriotic, even jingoistic, NCO, in a manner worthy of his blackest humor.

Who owns, who buys, who gives, and who notices objects is always significant in Austen's writing, placing characters socially and characterizing them symbolically. Jane Austen's Possessions and Dispossessions looks at the significance of objects in Austen's major novels, fragments, and juvenilia.

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.

The letters H, v., and O are central to Harrison's poetry. "H" in the play "The Big H," and many of Harrison's poems on language and class, stands for dropped aitches--missed rungs in his "ladder of aspiration," and for the chain of association he makes from the [h]owl of the Leeds City coat of arms to Herod, H-block, H-bomb, and Hiroshima. "H" is also celebrated in its absence, in loving reaffirmations of the bonds of dialect, class, and family. The verses/versus of Harrison's most controversial piece, "v.," are echoed in the "v-signs" and other invective of the angry dispossessed to whom his polyphonic writing gives a voice. "V" also stands for victory--the dearly-bought victories of wars, explored with the concomitant themes of imperialism and political propaganda. The black O haunts Harrison's work. The abyss; the nothingness of death, the extinction of personality, of art, of languages, of species, perhaps even of humankind; is figured in black burn-out circles, pits, mines, and empty skies. Its obverse is another O, where life is affirmed--the acting circle of Harrison's theatre work. Lucid and trenchant, Byrne's study is now the benchmark for students of Harrison's work.

Each play is fully annotated. "Contexts and Criticism" features all-new material on the author and his work, from traditional critical readings to more theorized approaches, among them essays on Shaw's Fabianism and his alleged feminism. Contributors include Leon Hugo, Sally Peters, Tracy C. Davis, John A. Bertolini, Stanley Weintraub, and J. Ellen Gainor. A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included.