'The Anthem Anthology of Victorian Sonnets' is a comprehensive collection of three thousand sonnets written by poets between 1836 and the early years of the twentieth century. The work contains a representative selection of sonnets for each individual poet, in order to display the diversity and innovation brought to the sonnet form by Victorian poets.

This volume is both an essential resource for undergraduates and graduates studying Victorian and Decadent literature and an instructive work for enthusiastic readers of verse. The wide span of the 1872–1900 epoch enables readers to appreciate in great depth the literary developments that led to the fin de siècle, unlike most studies of this period, which focus solely on the 1890s, with no relation to cultural and historical developments in the previous two important decades.

The Sonnet provides a comprehensive study of one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, widely used by Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, and still used today by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Carol Ann Duffy. This book traces the development of the sonnet from its origins in medieval Italy to its widespread acceptance in modern Britain, Ireland and America. It shows how the sonnet emerges from the aristocratic courtly centres of Renaissance Europe and gradually becomes the chosen form of radical political poets such as Milton. The book draws on detailed critical analysis of some of the best-known sonnets written in English to explain how the sonnet functions as a poetic form, and it argues that the flexibility and versatility of the sonnet have given it a special place in literary history and tradition.

In recent decades, there has been a growing recognition of the significance of the supernatural in a Victorian context. Studies of nineteenth-century spiritualism, occultism, magic, and folklore have highlighted that Victorian England was ridden with spectres and learned magicians. Despite this growing body of scholarship, little historiographical work has addressed the Devil. This book demonstrates the significance of the Devil in a Victorian context, emphasising his pervasiveness and diversity. Drawing on a rich array of primary material, including theological and folkloric works, fiction, newspapers and periodicals, and broadsides and other ephemera, it uses the diabolic to explore the Victorians' complex and ambivalent relationship with the supernatural. Both the Devil and hell were theologically contested during the nineteenth century, with an increasing number of both clergymen and laypeople being discomfited by the thought of eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, the Devil continued to play a role in the majority of English denominations, as well as in folklore, spiritualism, occultism, popular culture, literature, and theatre. The Devil and the Victorians will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-century English cultural and religious history, as well as the darker side of the supernatural.

This volume offers the first in-depth investigation of Thomas Heywood’s engagement with the classics. Its introduction and twelve essays trace how the classics shaped Heywood’s work in a variety of genres across a writing career of over forty years, ranging from drama, epic and epyllion, to translations, compendia and the design of a warship for Charles I. Close readings demonstrate the influence of a capaciously conceived classical tradition that included continental editions and translations of Latin and Greek texts, early modern mythographies and the medieval tradition of Troy. They attend to Heywood’s thought-provoking imitations and juxtapositions of these sources, his use of myth to interrogate gender and heroism, and his turn to antiquity to celebrate and defamiliarise the theatrical or political present. Heywood’s better-known works are discussed alongside critically neglected ones, making the collection valuable for undergraduates and researchers alike.