The British Periodical Text, 1797-1835
This collaborative audiobook derives from the 2006 Bristol University Conference on periodicals culture in the Romantic era.
A Guide to William Shakespeare: Troilus and Cressida
Treats Troilus and Cressida as a masterpiece in tune with 20th Century attitudes to love and war, and with literary and dramatic forms which developed through the last century.
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selected Poems
The thoroughly insightful and engaging study guide offers a detailed commentary on the poetry of Hopkins, exploring the significance of contemporary cultural issues and the poet's life as Catholic convert and Jesuit priest.
Reading Dickens's Bleak House
A Literature Insight on one of the supreme achievements of Victorian fiction, stressing the experimentalism of the dual narrative and its liberal feminist implications.
Coleridge the Visionary
Now a critical classic, Coleridge the Visionary was first published in 1959 by Chatto & Windus. This much-cited book throws light on the intellectual organisation of Coleridge's poetry and the imaginative qualities implicit in his philosophy.
Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet and Staying On
A historically informed and informing audio study guide to Scott's four great novels of British India -The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils - and of the popular coda, Staying On.
Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842
From 1787 to 1842, Wordsworth is preoccupied with the themes of loss and death, and with "natural piety" in the lives of people and nations. Beginning with his consciousness of the Bards and Druids of Cumbria, this book treats Wordsworth's oeuvre, including the "Gothic" juvenilia, The Ruined Cottage, Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion, and the Poems of 1842, as unified by a Bardic vocation, to bind "the living and the dead" and to nurture "the kind".
Reading Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems
Thomas Hardy is unique in English literature as a major novelist who is also a major poet. His collected poetry is among the most distinctive bodies of verse in the language, and includes such pinnacles of the lyric tradition as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and the series of haunted love-elegies written in memory of his first wife Emma and such instantly recognizable titles as ‘Drummer Hodge’, ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, ‘Convergence of the Twain’. It is also among the most controversial.
Landscapes of Language: Richard Brautigan's Fiction
Dr. John Tanner analyses Brautigan’s fiction against the background of the cultural and literary upheavals from which it emerged and demonstrates that Brautigan is no mere Sixties curio but an innovative and vibrant American voice ignored for far too long.
Shakespeare: King Lear A Guide to the Play
This audiobook aims to introduce students (including those with little or no prior experience of the field) to the worlds of Shakespeare and his theatre revealed in King Lear.
Reading William Faulkner: 'Go Down, Moses' & 'Big Woods'
Faulkner is notoriously a 'difficult' writer to study. This introductory study begins with three chapters clearly setting out the important facts of his life, mapping the people and history of his recurrent fictional setting, Yoknapatawpha County, and analysing the oddities and problems of his prose style.
Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862
Romantic Dialogues, first published in 2000, contributed to the modern recovery of a transatlantic dimension in literary studies.
D H Lawrence: Selected Short Stories
This Audiobook provides a stimulating and carefully structured introduction to Lawrence's short stories. It guides the reader to a deeper critical understanding of individual stories, but it also provides model commentaries on several of their most prominent narrative techniques.
Vladimir Nabokov: 'Lolita'
From its first publication in 1955 Nabokov's Lolita has been denounced as immoral filth, hailed as a moral masterpiece, and both praised and damned for stylistic excess. In this fresh appraisal John Lennard provides convenient overviews of Nabokov's life and of the novel (including both Kubrick's and Lyne's film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody.
Portuguese American Literature
This audiobook is the first in a new series of monographs entitled Contemporary American Literature.
A Guide to William Shakespeare: 'Richard III'
Provides a basis for informed discussion of Richard III, one of Shakespeare’s most beautifully crafted plays, and the issues it raises – which are as ominously relevant to politics and people now as they were when it was new.
Reading Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis
The audiobooks covers Octavia Butler's life and work; the background and structure of the trilogy; (Black) SF in relation to race and gender; the tradition of dystopias; and the work in genetics that is central to the plot
William Shakespeare: The Tempest
This audiobook study guide gives students the basis for an informed discussion of Shakespeare's magical play and to explore what would have been possible reactions to it when it was new.
Henrik Ibsen: A Dolls House
Stephen Siddall's study guide to one of Ibsen's most innovative and explosive plays.
This study guide to A Doll's House places it firmly in the context of nineteenth century European theatre, “˜novelty theatre”, and the society of Norway of its time.
William Shakespeare: Richard II
Professor Hattaway's study places Richard II within the contexts of Shakespeare's life and of the strenuous political debates that were taking place at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I.