This invaluable book includes a selection of early criticism and a wide range of informative essays from critics of the last twenty years. Contributors include: Ernest Jones, Wolfgang H. Clemen, D.G. James, Maynard Mack, H.D.F.Kitto, T.S. Eliot, Harry Levin, Helen Gardner, L.C.Knights, John Holloway, Patrick Cruttwell and Jan Kott.

First published in 1972. John D. Jump, a leading authority on Byron and the Romantic period, here gives an account of Byron’s literary achievement in relation to the age of revolutions in which he lived and in relation to his own character and personal circumstances. Professor Jump focuses upon the major poems and also discusses Byron’s prose, principally his letters and journals. In doing so he covers all of the important aspects of Byron’s work.

The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

In this classic and much-loved edition of Marlowe's best-known play, John D. Jump provides the reader with a wealth of introductory and explanatory material. As well as a fascinating chronology of Marlowe's life and works and extensive notes on the text, this edition includes a substantial and authoritative historical introduction to the play. An essential text whether studying the play in detail or coming to it for the first time.

First published in 1972, this book provides a helpful introduction to burlesque literature, a term used by critics from the seventh-century onwards to describe work in which an incongruity between serious subject-matter and style is used to provoke laughter. It examines the four main types of burlesque writing: Travesty, Hudibrastic, Parody and the Mock-Poem, as well as dramatic burlesques.

First published in 1974, this book provides a helpful overview to the ode. After introducing the reader to classical odes, it goes on to trace the development of two major types: the Pindaric ode and the Horatian ode. The book concludes with a study of odes from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.This book will be of particular interest to those studying poetry, verse form and literature more generally.

A revolutionary voice in English verse, and a much loved and celebrated lyric poet.

No poet has been more wilfully contradictory than John Donne, whose works forge unforgettable connections between extremes of passion and mental energy. From satire to tender elegy, from sacred devotion to lust, he conveys an astonishing range of emotions and poetic moods. Constant in his work, however, is an intensity of feeling and expression and complexity of argument that is as evident in religious meditations such as 'Good Friday 1613. Riding Westward' as it is in secular love poems s...

In writing this brief sketch of the Life of Tennyson, and this attempt to appreciate his work, I have rested almost entirely on the Biography by Lord Tennyson (with his kind permission) and on the text of the Poems. As to the Life, doubtless current anecdotes, not given in the Biography, are known to me, and to most people. But as they must also be familiar to the author of the Biography, I have not thought it desirable to include what he rejected.

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BEST BOOK OF THE YEARDrawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry, the animals, even the flowers–that wou...