First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be autobiographical in nature, one of Blake's attempts to order and account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its story is that of an artist's growth into and out of vision, and of his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the prophetic mode.

Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832 provides a valuable insight into the condition of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century. It includes original documents from a range of disciplines and discourses. Each section includes a scholarly introduction, select bibliography, and annotations.
Among the material assembled in the anthology are writings by previously neglected or under-represented women, working-class men, black radicals, and conservative and evangelical polemicists, as well as several unfamiliar texts by canonical writers. The writings are organised into sections on:
* Radical Journalism
* Political Economy
* Atheism
* Nation and State
* Race and Empire
* Gender
* Literary Institutions.

While the Victorian era has been extensively covered by scholars and critics, less attention has been given to the period that bridges the gap to Victorianism. "Romantic Period Writings 1798-1832" provides a valuable insight into the condition of Britain in the early part of the nineteenth century. Original documents from a range of disciplines and discourses include writings by previously neglected or under-represented women, working-class men, black radicals, and conservative and evangelical polemicists, as well as several previously neglected texts by canonical writers. The writings are organized into sections on Radical Journalism, Political Economy, Atheism, Nation and State, Race and Empire, Gender and Literary Institutions. Each section includes an introduction which contextualizes the following selections.

First appearing in 1981, this book was the first full-length study of the Songs of Innocence and Experience to be published in almost fifteen years. The book provides detailed readings of each poem and its accompanying design, to redirect attention to the nature and achievement of the book as a whole, to Songs as a single, carefully unified work of verbal and visual art. Particularly close attention is paid, not only to the designs Blake etched to accompany his poems, but also to the many books and treatises for and about children to which, it is argued, Songs alludes or is indebted. Like so many important works of this period, Songs is shown to be autobiographical in nature, one of Blake's attempts to order and account for the conflicts and crises of his own art and life. Its story is that of an artist's growth into and out of vision, and of his gradual realization of the dangers and deficiencies of the prophetic mode.

The final volume of the definitive authorised biography of one of the greatest American writers. 'A moving testament to one of the last century's greatest writers' Sunday Times At forty-nine, Saul Bellow was at the pinnacle of American letters - he was rich, famous and critically acclaimed, with the best yet to come: Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories. He went on to win two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. However, away from his desk, Bellow's life was set to become embroiled in controversy: over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. From the women he pursued and his turbulent family relations, to his struggles with cultural relativism and the perceived excesses of civil rights movements, this second and final volume of Zachary Leader's monumental Life of Saul Bellow charts Bellow's heroic energy and will throughout his life, right to the end - where his immense achievements and their costs, to himself and others, became ever more apparent. 'Brilliant' Spectator 'Compelling' Times Literary Supplement 'Riveting' New Statesman 'Superb' New York Times

The Movement was the preeminent poetical grouping of post-war Britain. 'We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end', boasted its most important poet, Philip Larkin, of his and Kingsley Amis's influence. That Larkin's boast proved well-founded even those who deplored Movement taste have agreed. According to Randall Stevenson, author of volume 12 of the Oxford English Literary History, English literature 'was never more static than under the influence of the Movement. If the later twentieth century proved a difficult period for poetry, it was in large measure because it took so long to realise this, and move on.' Moving on, though, was just what the Movement writers - Larkin, Amis, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest, John Wain, D.J. Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, and John Holloway - thought they were doing, even when deploring innovation and experiment. Was their influence, as detractors claim, stultifying, a lament for 'England gone'? What, moreover, of other charges: that Movement writing is dry, academic, insular? These accusations are as extreme as the anti-modernist accusations that sparked them, in particular those of Amis, Larkin, Conquest, and Davie.
The Movement Reconsidered, a collection of original essays by distinguished poets, critics, and scholars from Britain and America, sets out to show not only that relations between Movement and other post-war British writers were more complex and nuanced than is usually suggested, but that the role these relations played in shaping the current literary scene is important and complicated. Other topics it examines include the origins of the grouping; the role of mediating figures such as Auden, Empson, and Orwell; the part the writers themselves played in promoting the grouping; the interlocking network of academics, journalists, and editors who aided them; and analogous developments in other fields, notably philosophy, politics, and language. The book's ultimate aim is to encourage readers to come to Movement writing with fresh eyes and to gain a fairer sense of its range and power.

The Romantic author as spontaneous, extemporizing, otherworldly, and autonomous is a fiction much in need of revision. In this highly regarded volume, Zachary Leader argues that the continuing influence of a Romantic preference for what comes naturally, with a concomitant devaluing of the secondary processes, distorts our understanding of the actual creative practices of writers of the period, even those most closely associated with Romantic assumptions. `Second thoughts' (including those of collaborators) play a crucial role in the writings of Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Clare, and Keats. Other assumptions complicated by a study of the actual revising practices of Romantic writers are those which associate composition with the organic and with process, or which characterize authors as independent agents or figures of coherent and consistent subjectivity. In the first part of the book, Leader shows how revisionary and editorial habits (those not only of the writers themselves but of their modern editors) reflect conflicting attitudes to the self or personal identity; in the second, these attitudes are related to the role of `collaborators' in the revising process, including family, friends, publishers, critics, and readers.

Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post-World War II British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader's definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion.
In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader, the acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on published and unpublished works and correspondence, but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis's friends, relatives, fellow writers, students, and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken publicly before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis's childhood, school days, and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father, and lover. Neither evading nor sensationalizing the more salacious aspects of Amis's life, Leader explores the writer's phobias, self-doubts, and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence, and personal disaster.
Here is the biography that its subject deserves. Like Amis himself, it is incisive and unsentimental, deeply appreciative of aesthetic achievement, and a great source of amusing anecdotes. Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity, and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.