This book is for learners of English as a foreign language, at any level from intermediate upwards, who need to know more about Britain. It is invaluable to students on British Studies courses and to those who are studying British culture as a part of a general English course.

To Hell with Culture contains thirteen essays on anarchism and literature, with a focus on twentieth-century fiction, and on writers who have been neglected because of their non-canonical or regional status.

The ways in which anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have made an impact in British 20th-century literature are explored in this collection of critical essays. This radical and thus far under-considered topic is up for review now that traditional paradigms of leftist and radical thought are under reexamination and the Marxist tradition is being seen as an imposition on a situation that was always more various and complex than typical descriptions have admitted. These essays investigate the theory that in the early 20th century there were several currents of anarchist thought, ranging from extreme radicalism to effective conservativism, and that a good deal of the thinking and writing that has been classed as Marxist is in fact more accurately described as anarchist.

This exciting scholarly work examines Dutch maritime violence in the seventeenth century. The young Dutch Republic enjoyed a cultural and economic preeminence, and many of its seamen also took up pillaging, terrorizing their victims on the high seas and on European waterways. A story almost entirely untold until now, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands presents new data and understandings of early modern piracy generally, and also sheds important new light on Dutch and European history as well, such as the history of national identity and state formation, and the history of crime and criminality.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development, and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. MacLeod fills a large gap in understanding the movement that helped negotiate transition from the Victorian triple-decker to experimental Modernist fiction.

The book makes an original contribution to the scholarship of the history of British fiction by breaking away from the widely held critical position that women's narratives were outside and against the history of the genre. In her analysis of dual-voiced works from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Peters shows that women's metafictional discourse within the novel did not emerge as a late-twentieth-century reaction to the canon but has been present from the novel's beginnings.