How did a single genre of text have the power to standardise the English language across time and region, rival the Bible in notions of authority, and challenge our understanding of objectivity, prescription, and description? Since the first monolingual dictionary appeared in 1604, the genre has sparked evolution, innovation, devotion, plagiarism, and controversy. This comprehensive volume presents an overview of essential issues pertaining to dictionary style and content and a fresh narrative of the development of English dictionaries throughout the centuries. Essays on the regional and global nature of English lexicography (dictionary making) explore its power in standardising varieties of English and defining nations seeking independence from the British Empire: from Canada to the Caribbean. Leading scholars and lexicographers historically contextualise an array of dictionaries and pose urgent theoretical and methodological questions relating to their role as tools of standardisation, prestige, power, education, literacy, and national identity.

In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.

The last century was characterised by an extraordinary flowering of the art of poetry in Britain. These specially commissioned essays by some of the most highly regarded poetry critics offer a stimulating and reliable overview of English poetry of the twentieth century. The opening section on contexts will both orientate readers relatively new to the field and provide provocative syntheses for those already familiar with it. Following the terms introduced by this section, individual chapters cover many ways of looking at the 'modern', the 'modernist' and the 'postmodern'. The core of the volume is made up of extensive discussions of individual poets, from W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden to contemporary poets such as Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy. In its coverage of the development, themes and contexts of modern poetry, this Companion is the most useful guide available for students, lecturers and readers.

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics – ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood – providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation – her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

Demonstrates that the Oxford English Dictionary is an international product in both its content and its making.

Publisher Description

This is the leading, full-scale comprehensive dictionary of philosophical terms and thinkers to appear in English in more than half a century. Written by a team of more than 550 experts and now widely translated, it contains approximately 5,000 entries ranging from short definitions to longer articles. It is designed to facilitate the understanding of philosophy at all levels and in all fields. Key features of this third edition: • 500 new entries covering Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and covering individual countries such as China, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain • Increased coverage of such growing fields as ethics and philosophy of mind • More than 100 new intellectual portraits of leading contemporary thinkers • Wider coverage of Continental philosophy • Dozens of new technical concepts in cognitive science and other areas • Enhanced cross-referencing to add context and increase understanding • Expansions in both text and index to facilitate research and browsing