The Companion to Jonathan Swift explores crucial dimensions of Swift's life and works. As well as ensuring a broad coverage of Swift's writing - including early and later works as well as the better known and the lesser known - the Companion also offers a way into current critical and theoretical issues surrounding the author. Special emphasis is placed on Swift's vexed relationship with the land of his birth, Ireland; and on his place as a political writer in a highly politicised age.
Now best known for three great novels - Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews and Amelia - Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was one of the most controversial figures of his time. Prominent first as a playwright, then as a novelist and political journalist, and finally as a justice of peace, Fielding made a substantial contribution to eighteenth-century culture, and was hugely influential in the development of the novel as a form, both in Britain and more widely in Europe.
This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense.
The Arthurian legend has inspired European writers and artists for almost fifteen hundred years. From shadowy beginnings in early medieval chronicles and poems, it has developed through medieval romance to modern films and TV series. What can account for the evergreen popularity of the ‘Once and Future King’? There is no simple answer, but the Companion outlines the evolution of the legend from the earliest documentary sources to Spamalot and analyses how some of the major motifs of the legend have been passed down in both medieval and modern texts.
The Companion to Christopher Marlowe provides a full introduction to this famed pioneer of both the Elizabethan stage and modern English poetry. Sixteen leading scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on all relevant topics of Marlowe's life and works, including his texts and style, his use of classicism, his representations of sexuality and gender and of geography and identity. The volume also considers the religious, political, courtly and literary contexts of Marlowe's authorship, his presence in modern film and theatre, and his influence on subsequent writers.
