This is an ambitious and fascinating analysis of early twentieth-century English literature from Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence and Forster through figures like Joyce and Woolf to writers such as Evelyn Waugh. There are chapters on the younger writers of the age as well as the more popular minor writers like Buchan and Dornford Yates.

Deanna Smid presents a literary, historical account of imagination in early modern English literature, particularly imagination’s effects on the body and on women, its restraint by reason, and its ability to create novelty.

What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.

Here is an introduction to the history of English writing from East and West Africa drawing on a range of texts from the slave diaspora to the post-war upsurge in African English language and literature from these regions.

English Drama before Shakespeare surveys the range of dramatic activity in English up to 1590. The book challenges the traditional divisions between Medieval and Renaissance literature by showing that there was much continuity throughout this period, in spite of many innovations. The range of dramatic activity includes well-known features such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. Para-dramatic activity such as the liturgical drama, royal entries and localised or parish drama is also covered. Many of the plays considered are anonymous, but a coherent, biographical view can be taken of the work of known dramatists such as John Heywood, John Bale, and Christopher Marlowe. Peter Happé's study is based upon close reading of selected plays, especially from the mystery cycles and such Elizabethan works as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. It takes account of contemporary research into dramatic form, performance (including some important recent revivals), dramatic sites and early theatre buildings, and the nature of early dramatic texts. Recent changes in outlook generated by the publication of the written records of early drama form part of the book's focus. There is an extensive bibliography covering social and political background, the lives and works of individual authors, and the development of theatrical ideas through the period. The book is aimed at undergraduates, as well as offering an overview for more advanced students and researchers in drama and in related fields of literature and cultural studies.

A major new survey of literature in England during the first half of the twentieth century, Chris Baldick places modernist with non-modernist writings, high art with low entertainment. The Modern Movement ranges broadly covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, children's books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life.

The major claim made by this study is that early modern English prose fiction self-consciously invented a new form of literary culture in which professional writers created books to be printed and sold to anonymous readers. It further claims that this period's narrative innovations emerged not solely from changes in early modern culture like print and the book market, but also from the rediscovery of a forgotten late classical text from North Africa, Heliodorus's Aethiopian History. In making these claims, Steve Mentz provides a comprehensive historicist and formalist account of prose romance, the most important genre of Elizabethan fiction. He explores how authors and publishers of prose fiction in late sixteenth-century England produced books that combined traditional narrative forms with a dynamic new understanding of the relationship between text and audience. Though prose fiction would not dominate English literary culture until the eighteenth century, Mentz demonstrates that the form began to invent itself as a distinct literary kind in England nearly two centuries earlier. Examining the divergent but interlocking careers of Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, Mentz traces how through differing commitments to print culture and their respective engagements with Heliodoran romance, these authors helped make the genre of prose fiction culturally and economically viable in England. Mentz explores how the advent of print and the book market changed literary discourse, influencing new conceptions of what he calls 'middlebrow' narrative and new habits of reading and writing. This study draws together three important strains of current scholarly inquiry: the history of the book and print culture, the study of popular fiction, and the re-examination of genre and influence. It also connects early modern fiction with longer histories of prose fiction and the rise of the modern novel.