English Lit 101

From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charles Dickens' Tiny Tim to Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy and Shakespeare's Juliet, British authors have created some of the most compelling characters in all of literature. But too often, textbooks reduce these vibrant voices to boring summaries that would put even an English dean to sleep.

What are the key issues in contemporary literary studies? What notion of 'history' is appropriate for today's study of 'modern' (post-1800) literature? How can we best understand the recent transition from theory to literary history? In 20 chapters, this book both probes and answers these questions, and more, emphasising the importance of literary history to current critical thinking.

Although best known for his plays, William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was also a poet who achieved extraordinary depth and variety in only a few key works. This edition of his poetry provides detailed notes, commentary and appendices resulting in an academically thorough and equally accessible edition to Shakespeare’s poetry.

This book is a fully revised and largely expanded successor to Mr Williams's widely read Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952). In it he argues that although plays are meant to be acted, any play in which the text is no more than an outline, to be filled in by acting, production and decor, must fall short of the purpose and full scope of drama. The naturalistic theatre is criticised because in spite of some great achievements, the devices it makes use of to express the depths of human experience are never really adequate substitutes for the traditional language of the theatre: poetry.

A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism
The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future despite success in the past. The literary ground is shifting, as Ulysses is published in February and Proust’s In Search of Lost