Byron and Romanticism

Byron and Romanticism represents a quarter century of important scholarly work on the subtle ironies of Byron's poetry and of the Byzantine connections between that poetry and Byron's complicated life. McGann is especially interested in Byron's complex 'double-speaking'. Here's a critic who understands that Byron is always playing games with his audience - actually, with multiple audiences. And that they are extremely tricky, contradictory games …

In this remarkable new biography, Peter Ackroyd offers a different view of Dickens to that presented in his earlier study of the author. In that book, Ackroyd's attempts to mimic the voice of the great writer were highly controversial, though some saw the book as a radical re-invention of the biography form. There is no arguing with the brilliant achievement of the more straightforward Charles Dickens: Public Life and Private Passion, however; the picture of Dickens and his complicated private life that emerges is fastidiously detailed and powerfully evocative 

Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama

Looking at neglected plays but raising issues that bear on our reading of Marlowe and Shakespeare too, this timely and topical book explores the representation of aliens and strangers in sixteenth-century drama and offers an elegant and subtle account of the developing notions of Englishness they chart.

Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Rennaisance England

Why were sonnet sequences popular in Renaissance England? In this study, Christopher Warley suggests that sonneteers created a vocabulary to describe, and to invent, new forms of social distinction before an explicit language of social class existed. The tensions inherent in the genre - between lyric and narrative, between sonnet and sequence - offered writers a means of reconceptualizing the relation between individuals and society.