Louisa Stuart Costello (1799-1870) was a popular and critically acclaimed poet, novelist, travel writer, historian, biographer, artist, and medieval scholar, whose long life spanned the nineteenth cen
Since his death in 1989, it has become difficult to imagine that Samuel Beckett was once a virtually unknown writer. Born in 1906 into a respectable middle-class family in a Dublin suburb, he came lat
The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress is an extraordinary 8-foot by 800-foot painting that was created in 1851 and thought lost for a full century. Rediscovered in 1996 and fully restored in 2012,
"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem
"In 1763, the young James Boswell left Great Britain for a 'Grand Tour' of the Continent. The tour was a tradition among British and Scottish youths; by visiting the great historical sites, especially
Oscar Wilde's wit is foundational to his works, from his plays and novels to his self-defense at his trials. Through analysis of Wilde's collection of epigrams, "Phrases and Philosophies for
"The Irish poet and playwright's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appears in this splendid showcase of philosophy and wit. Additional selections include Wilde's ever-popular comedy, The Importa
Writers have always aspired to immortality, using their works to preserve their patrons, their loved ones, and themselves beyond death. For Pindar, Horace, and Shakespeare, the vehicle of such preserv
"A new annotated edition of Yeats's indispensable, lifelong work of philosophy--a meditation on the connections between the imagination, history, and the metaphysical--this volume reveals the poet's g
Jonathan Swift's angers were all too real, though Swift was temperamentally equivocal about their display. Even in his most brilliant satire, A Tale of a Tub, the aggressive vitality of the narrative is designed, for all the intensity of its sting, never to lose its cool. Yet Swift's angers are partly self-implicating, since his own temperament was close to the things he attacked, and behind his angers are deep self-divisions. Though he regarded himself as 'English' and despised the Irish 'natives' over whom the English ruled, Swift became the hero of an Irish independence he would not have desired. In this magisterial account, Claude Rawson, widely considered the leading Swift scholar of our time, brings together recent work, as well as classic earlier discussions extensively revised, offering fresh insights into Swift's bleak view of human nature, his brilliant wit, and the indignations and self-divisions of his writings and political activism.
"Over the last twenty five years, scholarship on Early Modern women writers has produced editions and criticisms, both on various groups and individual authors. The work on Mary Wroth has been particu
