This text has established itself as a successful and popular introductory student guide. This fully revised and expanded third edition offers practical help and guidance. It shows the reader how to approach novels, plays and poems, and includes chapters on themes, characters, structure, style, irony and analysis. In addition, sections on writing essays, how to revise, and how to use the critics make this book an invaluable companion for anyone beginning to study English literature.
Writing during periods of dramatic social change, Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Gaskell were both attracted to the idea of radical societal transformation at the same time that their writings express nostalgia for a traditional, paternalistic ruling class. Julie Nash shows how this tension is played out especially through the characters of servants in short fiction and novels such as Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent", "Belinda", and Helen and Gaskell's "North and South" and "Cranford".
Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women prisoners, Megan Sweeney examines how incarcerated women use available reading materials to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures.
Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks and Hyperreality
This book offers a captivating new interpretation of Lucian as a fictional theorist and writer to stand alongside the novelists of the day, bringing to bear on his works a whole new set of reading strategies. It argues that the aesthetic and cultural issues Lucian faced, in a world of mimesis and replication, were akin to those found in postmodern contexts: the ubiquity of the fake, the erasure of origins, the focus on the freakish and weird at the expense of the traditional.
Grief and Women Writers in the English Renaissance anatomizes the era's powerful but troubling links between the forgettable dead and the living mourners who are implicated in the same oblivion. Four major women writers from 1570 to 1670 construct these difficult bonds between the spectral dead and the liminal mourner.
