This volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time. Instead of an isolated genius living in retreat from the world, Herbert appears as a man writing public verse, active within an important social circle, and committed to nationalistic Protestantism.
This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, which included friendships with many of the major figures of the age and a high public profile as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, and maps them onto the contours of his literary career. It offers sustained critical evaluation both of Dracula and also of Stoker's lesser-known works, which prove to yield much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.
Mary Wollstonecraft was an extraordinary individual, yet her literary life exemplifies how many women of her time used print culture to bring about change. This study argues that Protestant society had traditionally sanctioned women's role in spreading literacy, but this became politicized in the 1790s. Wollstonecraft's literary vocation was shaped by the high expectations in both the radical circles of Unitarian publisher Joseph Johnson, and the Girondins in revolutionary Paris, of the power of print to educate and reform individuals and society.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)
Added by: huelgas | Karma: 1208.98 | Fiction literature | 1 February 2009
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'It is remarkable that there is anything new to say about the canonical figure of Coleridge. But in this literary life William Christie says it...a brilliant, even dazzling contribution to international literary criticism' - Judges' report, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 'This literary life will prove to be one of the most thoughtful, generous and entertaining books ever written on Coleridge' - Professor Deirdre Coleman
Added by: huelgas | Karma: 1208.98 | Fiction literature | 1 February 2009
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Rudyard Kipling has been one of the most loved and the most loathed of English writers. Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life is a study of the forces and influences that shaped his work--including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of Empire, and the deaths of two of his children--and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him, but could never ignore him.
