"Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: - Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts - Guides to key critics, concepts and topics - An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research - Case studies in reading literary and critical texts - Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. "The Renaissance Literature Handbook" is a comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the "English Renaissance" or "Early Modern" period. >

Thomas More: Utopia/ Francis Bacon: New Atlantis/Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines With the publication of Utopia (1516), Thomas More introduced into the English language not only a new word, but a new way of thinking about the gulf between what ought to be and what is. His Utopia is at once a scathing analysis of the shortcomings of his own society, a realistic suggestion for an alternative mode of social organization, and a satire on unrealistic idealism. Enormously influential, it remains a challenging as well as a playful text. This edition reprints Ralph Robinson's 1556 translation from More's original Latin together with letters and illustrations that accompanied early editions of Utopia. Utopia was only one of many early modern treatments of other worlds. This edition also includes two other, hitherto less accessible, utopian narratives. New Atlantis (1627) offers a fictional illustration of Francis Bacon's visionary ideal of the role that science should play in the modern society. Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a precursor of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, engages with some of the sexual, racial, and colonialist anxieties of the end of the early modern period. Together these texts illustrate the diversity of the early modern utopian imagination, as well as the different purposes to which it could be put. 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.

Of the huge body of critical writing devoted to Shakespeare's plays, by far the greatest proportion is concerned with the tragedies - and, for students of English literature, a familiarity with the great tragedies remains a necessity. To deal with such a massive volume of critical writing, however is no simple task. Critical commentary on King Lear ranges across nearly three centuries and reflects the changing tastes, perceptions and literary conventions of many ages. In this Readers' Guide, Susan Bruce provides the readers with a pathway through the major writings on King Lear, tracing the development of the numerous critical debates and shifts in perspective that have led to the successive revaluations of this central work. The Guide provides extracts and essays from contemporary critics who write as academics and literary scholars, as well as from those who wrote as 'educated amateurs' in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and at each stage the secondary material is set in context and arranged to provide students with a firm grasp of the progress of critical thinking on the play.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The challenges presented by feminism to traditional understandings of representation, normative values, power relations and the political are not simply the product of late-20th century thinking. Feminist Moments, in examining some of the pivotal texts in the history of feminist thought, demonstrates that these challenges emerge from a long and varied history of feminist writing. The volume brings together texts from literary and analytical works written by women and men, and from inside and outside the Western tradition, including Mary Wortley Montagu, Anna Wheeler and William Thompson, Nazira Zeineddine, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin and Luisa Valenzuela. The volume is unique in offering close readings of key passages from the selected texts, making it ideal for classroom use; its original essays, all authored by specialists, will also be of interest to more advanced scholars. In juxtaposing and analysing a wide range of texts which despite their significance are rarely discussed together, Feminist Moments provides a fascinating historical narrative of feminist thought which will be highly valuable to students and scholars of the history of political thought, political philosophy and gender and literary studies.

"Literature and Culture Handbooks" are an innovative series of guides to major periods, topics and authors in British and American literature and culture. Designed to provide a comprehensive, one-stop resource for literature students, each handbook provides the essential information and guidance needed from the beginning of a course through to developing more advanced knowledge and skills. Written in clear language by leading academics, they provide an indispensable introduction to key topics, including: - Introduction to authors, texts, historical and cultural contexts - Guides to key critics, concepts and topics - An overview of major critical approaches, changes in the canon and directions of current and future research - Case studies in reading literary and critical texts - Annotated bibliography (including websites), timeline, glossary of critical terms. "The Renaissance Literature Handbook" is a comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the "English Renaissance" or "Early Modern" period. >