Through original essays from a distinguished team of international scholars and Hardy specialists, A Companion to Thomas Hardy provides a unique, one-volume resource, which encompasses all aspects of Hardy's major novels, short stories, and poetry

• Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates from some of the world's leading Hardy scholars
• Reveals groundbreaking insights through examinations of Hardy’s major novels, short stories, poetry, and drama
• Explores Hardy's work in the context of the major intellectual and socio-cultural currents of his time and assesses his legacy for subsequent writers

This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age.

• Provides an expansive and inter-disciplinary approach to Renaissance plays and the world they played to.
• Offers a colourful and comprehensive overview of the material conditions of England's most important dramatic period.
• Gives readers facts and data along with up-to-date interpretation of the plays.
• Looks at the drama in terms of its cultural agency, its collaborative nature, and its ideological complexity.

A Companion to American Studies is an essential volume that brings together voices and scholarship from across the spectrum of American experience.

This volume brings together some of the most exciting renaissance scholars to suggest new ways of thinking about the period and to set a new series of agendas for Renaissance scholarship.

• Overturns the idea that it was a period of European cultural triumph and highlights the negative as well as the positive.
• Looks at the Renaissance from a world, as opposed to just European, perspective.
• Views the Renaissance from perspectives other than just the cultural elite.
• Gender, sex, violence, and cultural history are integrated into the analysis.

This monumental collection of new and recent essays from an international team of eminent scholars represents the best contemporary critical thinking relating to both literary and philosophical studies of literature.

• Helpfully groups essays into the field's main sub-categories, among them ‘Relations Between Philosophy and Literature’, ‘Emotional Engagement and the Experience of Reading’, ‘Literature and the Moral Life’, and ‘Literary Language’
• Offers a combination of analytical precision and literary richness
• Represents an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike, ideal for course use