Jane Austen's Art of Memory

Jane Austen's Art of Memory offers a radical new thesis about Jane Austen's construction of her art. It argues that, with the help of her tenacious memory, she engaged in friendly dialogue with her predecessors, the English writers, a process that the eighteenth century called 'imitation'. Her allusions, far from being random, thicken and complicate her novels in a manner that is poetic rather than mimetic.

Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930

Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalized writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H. D. and Mina Loy have been reassessed.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart (Oxford English Monographs)

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers.

Tennesse Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire (Bloom's Guides)

Tennessee Williams's groundbreaking play set in New Orleans centers on the decline of the fragile Blanche DuBois at the hands of her ruthless brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

Albert Camus's The Stranger (Bloom's Guides)

Camus' landmark novel traces the aftermath of a shocking crime and the man whose fate is sealed with one rash and foolhardy act. "The Stranger" presents readers with a new kind of protagonist, a man unable to transcend the tedium and inherent absurdity of everyday existence in a world indifferent to the struggles and strivings of its human denizens. This addition to the "Bloom's Guides" series features an annotated bibliography and a listing of works by the author for further reading.