Since Achilles first stormed into our imagination, literature has introduced its readers to truly unforgettable martial characters. In Men at War Christopher Coker discusses some of the most famous of these fictional creations and their impact on our understanding of war and masculinity. Grouped into five archetypes - warriors, heroes, villains, survivors and victims - these characters range across 3000 years of history, through epic poems, the modern novel and one of the twentieth cen- tury's most famous film scripts.

The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century and the advent of print in the fifteenth.

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her autobiographical poem My Life, a best-selling book of innovative American poetry, has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. The Language of Inquiry is a comprehensive and wonderfully readable collection of her essays, and its publication promises to be an important event for American literary culture. Here, Hejinian brings together twenty essays written over a span of almost twenty-five years. Like many of the Language Poets with whom she has been associated since the mid-1970s, Hejinian turns to language as a social space, a site of both philosophical inquiry and political address.

Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—to the iconic poem “The Raven.”

Paul Edmondson presents Shakespeare afresh as a dramatist and poet, and encourages us to take ownership of his works for ourselves as words to be spoken as well as discussed. We get a sense of what his life was like, his language, and cultural legacy. We catch glimpses of Shakespeare himself, how he wrote, and see what his works mean to readers and theatre practitioners. We see how Shakespeare tackled the biggest themes of humanity: power, history, war, and love.