C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer...

This book is the most comprehensive collection of essays, criticisms, and analyses of the author C. H. Sisson, dubbed as "one of the great translators of our time" by the Times Literary Supplement. This work provides an insightful look into C. H. Sisson's work and that of his peers, and provides readers with a better understanding of the state of literature in Britain and Europe in the 20th century.

Christina Rossetti was in a sense the first poet of the Pre-Raphelites, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) having been - as if by accident - the writing from that group which first caught public attention. It contains many of her best poems. Later work - devotional poems, love lyrics and descriptive pieces - extended the themes and forms of her first remarkable collection. It is remarkable, but in a quiet and intense way, not in the manner of those who seem to have learned from her a...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: 'they exist with the intensity of hallucinations'. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of To Helen - 'Like those Nicéan barks of yore, / that gently o'er a perfumed sea...', or the claustrophobic horror of The Raven, Poe offers haunting alternative realities, as strange - and strangely familiar - as our dreams and nightmares. Yet Poe was more than ...

His reputation has never settled, seeing as many reversals after his death as during his life. Though read and enjoyed ny many, fewer admire him openly. This volume includes all of his poetry and his most important essays.

A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas bring together Virginia Woolf's most sustained meditations on women, literature, education, and power. The first essay, poised between fiction, lecture, and critical argument, invents a supple, ironic narrative voice to expose the material conditions behind literary production. The second, more polemical and documentary in method, links patriarchy, professional exclusion, nationalism, and war. Together they stand at the center of modernist feminist pro...

Twice-Told Tales is a short story collection in two volumes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first was published in the spring of 1837, and the second in 1842. The stories had all been previously published in magazines and annuals, hence the name.

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the AmericanRomantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in ...

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: 'How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?'As well as being a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose ( Preoccupations

The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical essay in the 1940s, wh...