English Literature and Creative Writing: Books

Churchyard Poetics : Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre

The familiar literary-critical category of ‘graveyard poetry’ has made the eighteenth-century churchyard a commonplace in the period’s cultural imaginary: a location in which melancholy, religious poets get lost in imaginative reveries or didactic visions of the afterlife. By contrast, Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre shows how the churchyard takes on a new shape and a fresh importance for a counter-tradition of women and labouring-class poets, for whom this landscape is a resting place with no closure. In work by Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare—but also for Robert Blair, Thomas Gray, and William Wordsworth—the churchyard emerges as a contested space of social life through a shared focus on the body as the instrument of labour. The book focuses on how these poets use genres such as georgic, pastoral, topographical poetry, and elegy to locate the churchyard in a broader terrain of laborious life, disarranged in the press towards industrial capitalism.

(Provided by Publisher.)

James Metcalf is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Manchester.

A Guide to Creative Writing and the Imagination

Teaching creative writing for the multicultural, global, and digital generation, this volume offers a fresh approach for enhancing core writing skills in the major forms of Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Drama. Creative Writing and the Imagination aims to provide students with organic, active learning through imitation and examples which not only emphasize writing and reading but look to other art forms for inspiration. This volume's key features include: Strengthening key underlying capabilities of what we mean by imagination: physical and mental alertness, clarity of perception, listening skills, attention to detail, sustained concentration, lateral thinking, and enhanced memory. Taking direction from other art forms such as African American musical improvisation, Brancusi's sculptural idea of "finding form," key idea from drawing such as foreground, background, and negative space-and some of the great lessons learned from National Geographic photography. Incorporating techniques drawn from unusual sources such as advertising, military intelligence, ESL, working with the blind, stage magic, and oral traditions of remote indigenous cultures in Oceania and Africa. The work is intended for a global English market as core or supplementary text at the undergraduate level and as a supporting frame at the M.F.A. level (Provided by publisher).

Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality

Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality rethinks the role of gender politics in the oeuvre, demonstrates Beckett's historical importance in the development of the 'antisocial thesis' in queer theory, and shows the work's attachment to sexuality as temporarily consolatory but ultimately unbearable. The Beckett oeuvre might seem unpromising material for gender and sexuality studies, but this is exactly what makes it worth considering. This Element brings to Beckett questions that have emerged from gender, queer, and trans theory, engages with the history of feminism and sexuality studies, and develops a theoretical framework able to account for what we have previously overlooked, underplayed, and misinterpreted in Beckett. In the spirit of being 'on the lookout for an elsewhere', it makes a case for a queerly generative de-idealisation of Beckett as an object of critical study (Provided by Publisher).

This title was acquired through the Library's Order a Book service.

Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism

Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Criticism identifies the early reception of Paradise Lost as a site of contest over the place of literature in political and religious controversy. Milton's earliest readers and critics (Dryden, Addison, Dennis, Hume, and Bentley) confronted a poem and author at odds with prevailing culture and the revanchist conservatism of the restored monarchy. Grappling with the epic required navigating Milton's reputation as a "fanatick" who had called in print for Charles I's execution, inveighed openly against monarchy on the eve of Charles II's return, and held heretical views on the trinity, baptism, and divorce. Harper argues that foundational figures in English literary criticism rose to this challenge by innovating new ways of reading: producing creative (and subversive) rewritings of Paradise Lost, articulating new theories of the sublime, explaining the poem in the first substantial body of annotations for an English vernacular text, and by pioneering early forms of textual criticism and editing (Provided by Publisher).

British Writing from Empire to Brexit : Writing, Identity and Nation

This introduction to British literature from 1900-2021 looks at British writing from the perspective of the 2016 Brexit vote and its seismic repercussions. The book covers a wide variety of British literature in order to expose the cultural and political history of Britain, its repeated challenges and highly class-bound, patriarchal structure. British Writing from Empire to Brexit: Writing, Identity and Nation offers a stark view of what British culture has come to represent and the repercussions. Not shying away from discussions around imperialism, nationalism and racism, Robert Spencer, Howard J. Booth and Anastasia Valassopoulos offer a radical deconstruction of what Britishness can, and should, mean, promoting a convincing and accessible way to rethink the texts and field. 

(Provided by Publisher).