Now at seventy-three volumes, this popular MLA series (ISSN 10591133) addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. Upper-level undergraduate and graduate students, student teachers, education specialists, and teachers in all humanities disciplines will find these volumes particularly helpful. ...

Since the 1840s, when Victorian England emerged into the modern era and industrial cities became the new cultural centers, regionalist literature has posited itself as an aesthetic alternative to nationalist culture. Yet what differentiates regionalism's claims of authenticity, derived from blood and soil, from those of nationalism? Through close readings and theoretical elaborations, Roberto M. Dainotto reveals the degree to which regionalism ...

Frank is a forty-something failed writer. He is in the grips of an undeclared passion for his best friend's 17-year-old son, whom he has saved from drowning with mouth to mouth resuscitation. After Frank makes a bungled attempt to confess his feelings, the boy is killed in a motorbike accident. Yet all of this in buried in a social comedy in the hands of Elyot, a past master at employing the grim reaper to sharpen his hilarity. ...

<P>George Eliot's reception as a writer has been checkered from the start. Prejudice followed the revelation of her real identity as a woman, and she suffered from critical neglect at the start of the twentieth century before a postwar renaissance of interest established her as one of the most powerful of British novelists.</P><P>Focusing on three of Eliot's most influential and widely read "Midlands" ...

"Leicester performs a full-scale revision of the 'dramatic way of reading Chaucer, ' the 'character-oriented, dramatic approaches' that continue to underlie many (perhaps most) current readings of Chaucer. His well-articulated approach to the "Tales is informed by immersion in and understanding of current literary-critical theory. In fact, he makes an important intervention in critical theory (certainly in medieval literary criticism) in his ...

In her major new study of postcolonial fiction, Judie Newman demonstrates the subversive nature of that fiction, in its refusal to be contained within purely "literary" bounds, or even within the bounds of discourse. She investigates the ways in which major contemporary novelists from India, Africa, and the Caribbean have explored colonial and post-colonial situations, particularly by revising the classics of the past in relation to contemporary ...

The two plots of this tragicomedy concern a black prince sold into slavery and two white women who are husband-hunting in Surinam. Through a discussion of the status of women in the period and of attitudes towards slavery, the editors demonstrated Southerne's complex attempt to explore a parallel between the conditions of slaves and women in contemporary society. They also consider the play in terms of Southerne's high Tory politics and in its ...

This book draws on contemporary literary, political, and social theory not only to revise our understanding of Byron but also to reexamine the romanticism of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Hazlitt, and Shelley. ...

In Michael Longley's own selection from thirty years of writing, humane and lyrical poems express intimacies of love and grief within his deeply disturbed province. His sympathy and acute eye extend from ordinary neighbors to the most vulnerable forms in nature. Recently he has returned more frequently to his roots in classical literature to portray his own society aslant through refashionings of episodes of Homer and Ovid. ...

Not long ago a great-grandniece of Thomas Davis, a descendant of his brother James, while looking through a bundle of newspaper cuttings of the Young Ireland period, came upon a packet of seven letters written by Annie Hutton, the young girl to whom Davis was betrothed. Six of these letters are addressed to Davis himself, and belong to the short period of the engagement which ended with Davis' death at the age of 31. The seventh was written six ...