This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the little-known cultural history of perfum...

The last of the Romantics, Swinburne's poems took the public by storm, intoxicated by their rhythms and shocked by his lack of restraint.

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response t...

First Published in 1967. This volume is a collection of works, like letters, autobiographies and eye-witness accounts, relating to historical data that exits relating to 'mind in creation'. It includes an appendix with 'The Birth of a Poem' by Robert B.M. Nichols.

**Clive James was one of our finest critics and best-loved cultural voices. He was also a prize-winning poet. With his customary wit, delightfully lucid prose style and wide-ranging knowledge, Poetry Notebook draws together his best writing on the art form that mattered to him most.'Marvellously entertaining' – Observer'He reminds us that poetry is, or can be, "the most exciting thing in the world"' – Martin Amis**Since he was first enthralled by t...

Best known for his provocative take on cultural issues in The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good Are the Arts?, John Carey describes in this warm and funny memoir the events that formed him - an escape from the London blitz to an idyllic rural village, army service in Egypt, an open scholarship to Oxford and an academic career that saw him elected, age 40, to Oxford's oldest English Literature professorship.He frankly portrays the snobberies and rituals of...

'I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,' John Keats soberly prophesied in 1818 as he started writing the blankverse epic Hyperion. Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness....

In this beautiful reissue, the author of 'Footsteps' collects the biographical curiosities he discovered while researching the romantic poets, creating a captivating mixture of biography and memoir.‘Sidetracks' is a sister book to 'Footsteps', conjured up from decades of 'wanderings from the straight and narrow' of his major biographies of Shelley and Coleridge. As Holmes himself says, 'to be sidetracked is, after all, to be led astray by a path or an idea, a scent or a tune, and m...

Henry V is a Shakespearean history play by William Shakespeare, believed to be written in 1599. It is based on the life of King Henry V of England, and focuses on events immediately before and after the Battle of Agincourt during the Hundred Years' War.The play is the final part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II, Henry IV, part 1 and Henry IV, part 2. The original audiences would thus have already been familiar with the title character, who was depicted in the Henry IV plays as a wild...

The inspiration for the annual Pleasure of Reading PrizeA charming and revealing collection of essays from some of our best-loved writers about the pleasures of reading, with royalties donated to the Give a Book charityIn this delightful collection forty-three acclaimed writers explain what first made them interested in literature, what inspired them to read and what makes them continue to do so. Original contributors include Marga...

In "Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems," Samuel Taylor Coleridge captivates readers with his masterful use of vivid imagery and lyrical beauty, showcasing the complexities of human emotion and nature. The titular poem, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," explores themes of guilt, redemption, and the profound connection between humanity and the natural world through its haunting narrative and innovative structure. Coleridge's penchant for the supernatural and philosophical is evide...

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.' When Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he is captivated by his own beauty. Tempted by his world-weary, decadent friend Lord Henry Wotton, he wishes to stay forever young, and pledges his very soul to keep his good looks. Set in fin-de-siécle London, the novel traces a path from the studio of painter Basil Hallward to the opium dens of the East End. As Dorian's slide into crime and cruelty progresses...