Eighteenth-Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered begins with the brute fact that poetry jostled up alongside novels in the bookstalls of eighteenth-century England. Indeed, by exploring unexpected collisions and collusions between poetry and novels, this volume of exciting, new essays offers a reconsideration of the literary and cultural history of the period. The novel poached from and featured poetry, and the "modern" subjects and objects privileged by "rise of the novel" scholarship are only one part of a world full of animate things and people with indistinct boundaries. Contributors: Margaret Doody, David Fairer, Sophie Gee, Heather Keenleyside, Shelley King, Christina Lupton, Kate Parker, Natalie Phillips, Aran Ruth, Wolfram Schmidgen, Joshua Swidzinski, and Courtney Weiss Smith.

British comedy adapted by Ayub Khan-Din from his stage comedy 'Rafta, Rafta'. Set in Bolton, the film stars Amara Karan and Reece Ritchie as young newlyweds Vina and Atul, for whom married life is proving far from straightforward. What with his interfering parents (Harish Patel and Meera Syal), the childish pranks of his brother, nosy neighbours and a community that thrives on gossip, Atul becomes so woefully inhibited by the whole situation that his beautiful virgin bride looks set to remain just that, as a consummation of their union becomes nothing short of an impossibility.

The Collected Poems of Amelia Alderson Opie offers the first collected, scholarly edition of poetical writings of one of the most celebrated women writers of the early nineteenth century. It brings together poems from a variety of sources, including three volumes of poetry assembled by the author, annual anthologies, periodicals, songs, manuscripts, fictional tales, broad sheets, separately published pamphlets, and unpublished private correspondence. The poems included cover the entire range of Opie's long career, starting with her earliest surviving works from the 1790s and extending through her last poems in 1850. The arrangement proposed for this edition gives an overall sense of Opie's development from her early experiments with short lyrics appearing in The Annual Anthology, The Cabinet, and The European Magazine to her first large-scale success with Poems and the publication of a number of song lyrics, to the longer narrative poems in The Warrior's Return to the final phase of her publishing life after officially joining the Quakers in 1825 - the appearance of Lays for the Dead, a sequence of elegies for both private and public figures. Until now, Opie has been known primarily through a few frequently anthologized poems focusing on her response to the war with France and her support of the abolition movement. The Collected Poems offers the opportunity to explore more fully the contribution made to literary culture in the period by a woman who throughout her life used poetry as the basis of affective connection with her world.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a prominent eighteenth-century printer and businessman as well as an important and influential English novelist. He was also a prolific letter writer. This volume in the first ever full edition of Richardson's correspondence offers a fascinating glimpse of the writer in his final years - at the height of his professional powers but facing the challenging circumstances of physical decline and commercial conflict. The collection of miscellaneous letters addresses a variety of issues ranging from details of Richardson's printing operation to his mentorship of women writers including Sarah Fielding, Anna Meades and Frances Sheridan. Other correspondents of note include Samuel Johnson, Meta Klopstock, Thomas Sheridan and Tobias Smollett. Taken together this series of letters draws an intimate picture of Richardson's professional and personal circles as they exchange family gossip, business advice, literary anecdotes and news of the day.

"This edition is wonderfully rich. It is a pleasure to know that the text that made Opie's reputation in her own day is back in print and prepared by such able hands." -- Christine M. Cooper, University of Massachusetts, Amherst