This supplement focuses on contemporary writers, many of whom have received little sustained attention from critics. Some of important writers from the past have already attracted a good deal of sustained attention, and their work is often taught in college courses, but for various reasons their careers have not yet been discussed in American Writers. The poets included here are well known in the poetry world, and their work has in each case been honored with major literary prizes.
Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars
A work that is interesting, engaging and extremely informative. He deals with a complex subject clearly and he powerfully conveys the importance of war in the writing and thinking of those he studies.
Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brims with fresh material: from fish and chips to the first curry house in Britain, from mother's milk to Marx, from Kant on dinner parties to Mary Wollstonecraft on toilets. It examines a wide variety of Romantic writers: Hegel, Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, and lesser-known writers such as William Henry Ireland and Charles Piggot. It includes a look at some legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth century, such as the work of Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Philip Larkin.
The 13th supplement to the series contains biographies and critical analysis of the works of 18 mainly contemporary writers and poets, including Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Stephen Dobyns, Tillie Olsen, Luis Omar Salinas, Terry McMillan, and Yusef Komunyakaa. Each entry offers a critical review of a selection of the writer's work, a biography, discussion of the writer's career, and selected bibliography. An index for the whole series is included. This reference is useful to high school and undergraduate students.
