Along with Shakespeare, Jane Austen (1775-1817) can be said to be the most widely studied author in the history of English literature. But unlike Shakespeare, her language has received little scholarly attention. This is especially true for the language of her letters. Jane Austen's letters, mostly addressed to her sister Cassandra but to various other people as well, have been described as the equivalent of telephone conversations, and if you read them, you can almost hear her speak. We do not have access to actual speech from the time in which she lived, but the letters take us as close to the spoken language of the period as you might hope to get.

Situated within the Handbooks to Literature series, the group of Oxford Handbooks to Shakespeare are designed to record past and present investigations and renewed and revised judgments by both familiar and younger Shakespearean specialists. Each of these volumes is edited by one or more internationally distinguished Shakespeareans; together, they comprehensively survey the entire field.
An essential resource for the study of Shakespeare, The  Handbook to Shakespeare is edited by esteemed scholar Arthur Kinney and contains forty specially written essays.

Previous criticism has not adequately discussed oriental aspects of the content of Shakespearean drama. In addition to his portrayal of oriental figures (such as Cleopatra, Othello, and Shylock) and his use of literary genres and motifs that have roots in oriental tradition (such as that of the tragic romance in Romeo and Juliet, there are certain key elements in Shakespeare’s thought and outlook that can only be properly understood within the larger contribution of the oriental legacy.

My Friend Tom is at once Smith's critical analysis of Williams's early work in poetry and drama, a brief biography of Williams during his development stages as a writer, and a moving meditation on his friend's career from Williams's early failures and ambiguities to fame and notoriety. Smith provides in-depth looks at the inception, development, and reception (both commercial and critical) of such early Williams efforts as Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind, and later Battle of Angels.

How do we feel for others? Must we try to understand other minds? Do we have to respect others' autonomy, or even their individuality? Or might sympathy be fundamentally more intuitive, bodily and troubling?
Taking as her focus the work of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Vernon Lee (the first novelist to use the word 'empathy'), Kirsty Martin explores how modernist writers thought about questions of sympathetic response.