Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) was a highly original author of fantastic fiction - novels and short stories - and a key in Irish conservative poitics during the first half o the Victorian age. This outstanding biography, appearing in a new paperback edition with fresh appendix matter, explores the contradictions of his achievement. 'It can be thoroughly recommended.' - John Arden, New Statesman. 'One of the qualitites of this excellent studies is the train of associations which is provokes. It...

This, the first ever biography of John Hewitt, is based on archival material, both personal and literary. In many ways it is also a biography of his wife, Roberta (nee Black), whose manuscript journal is also in the public domain. To establish Hewitt's late arrival as a poet, the book opens with a chapter recounting his negotiations with a London publisher over a long period and the eventual appearance of No Rebel Word (1949). Successive chapters trace his education, courtship, li...

In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt by SS Untersturmfuhrer Bethge. Four years later, the poet publicly commended Nazi legislation before leaving Dublin to die in southern France. These hitherto neglected, isolated and scandalous details stand at the heart of this reflective study of Yeats's life, his attitudes towards death, a...

A major work by a brilliant young biographer, Muckraker details the tenacity and verve of one of Victorian Britain's most compelling characters. Credited with pioneering investigative reporting, W. T. Stead made a career of 'muckraking': revealing horrific practices in the hope of shocking authorities into reform. As the editor of the Northern Echo, he won the admiration of the Liberal statesman William Gladstone for his fierce denunciation of the Conservative government; at the helm of Lo...

The Irish novel has had a distinguished history. It spans such diverse authors as James Joyce, George Moore, Maria Edgeworth, Bram Stoker, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Lady Morgan, John Banville, and others. Yet it has until now received less critical attention than Irish poetry and drama. This volume covers three hundred years of Irish achievement in fiction, with essays on key genres, themes, and authors. It provides critiques of individual works, accounts of important novelists, and h...

The nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion in the reading public and an explosive growth in the number of books and newspapers produced to meet its demands. These specially commissioned essays examine not only the full range and variety of texts that entertained and informed the Victorians, but also the boundaries of Victorian literature: the links and overlap with Romanticism in the 1830s, and the roots of modernism in the years leading up to the First World War. The Compani...

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. This book illuminates the worlds - social, political, economic and artistic - in which Dickens worked. Dickens's professional life encompassed work as a novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. This volume offers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens's age,...

He proclaimed himself a genius and raged against the slightest criticism from fellow scholars; he was a Marxist who despised the 'Idiot People'; he could be generous and affectionate yet hurled insults at his friends; he inveighed against Puritanism but was himself in many ways a Puritan: A. L. Rowse was a man of many contradictions.In this clear-sighted and absorbing biography, Richard Ollard examines the many sides of Rowse's Protean personality to reveal a man who, whatever he w...

'In the course of these fifty years we have become a nation of public speakers. Everyone speaks now. We are now more than ever a debating, that is, a Parliamentary people' (The Times, 1873). The Art of Eloquence considers how Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, and Joyce responded to this 'Parliamentary people', and examines the ways in which they and their publics conceived the relations between political speech and literary endeavour. Drawing on a wide range of sources - classica...

Claire Connolly offers a cultural history of the Irish novel in the period between the radical decade of the 1790s and the gaining of Catholic Emancipation in 1829. These decades saw the emergence of a group of talented Irish writers who developed and advanced such innovative forms as the national tale and the historical novel: fictions that took Ireland as their topic and setting and which often imagined its history via domestic plots that addressed wider issues of dispossession and inher...

Games obsessed the Victorian and Edwardian public schools. The obsession has become widely known as athleticism. When it appeared in 1981, this book was the first major study of the games ethos which dominated the lives of many Victorian and Edwardian public schoolboys. Written with Professor Mangan's customary panache, it has become a classic, the seminal work on the social and cultural history of modern sport.

An introduction to all the leading Irish writers and some of the lesser known playwrights, novelists, short story writers, poets, placing them in context and providing a list of their works. Commentaries give brief but telling insights into their work.The story of Irish writing is followed, beginning with Swift, and working through playwrights Synge and O’Casey to Beckett and Friel; from nineteenth-century poetry through Yeats to Seamus Heaney and Paul Durcan; in novels, from Maria...