Chris Baldick

A collection of thirty-seven gothic horror tales includes stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Eudora Welty, and Isak Dinesen.

The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales

This book surveys the early history of one of our most important modern myths: the story of Frankenstein and the monster he created from dismembered corpses, as it appeared in fictional and other writings before its translation to the cinema screen. It examines the range of meanings which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein offers in the light of the political images of `monstrosity' generated by the French Revolution. Later chapters trace the myth's analogues andprotean transformations in subsequent writings, from the tales of Hoffmann and Hawthorne to the novels of Dickens, Melville, Conrad, and Lawrence, taking in the historical and political writings of Carlyle and Marx as well as the science fiction of Stevenson and Wells. The author shows that while the mythdid come to be applied metaphorically to technological development, its most powerful associations have centred on relationships between people, in the family, in work, and in politics.

Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-century Writing

In Frankenstein's Shadow

Contains a fully updated A-Z guide to over 1,200 definitions of terms from the fields of literary theory and criticism, rhetoric, versification and drama. Recommendations for further reading are included.

The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

Jane Desmarais

The tradition of Decadent writing in the 19th century remains a fascinating current in the evolution of modern literature. This new anthology brings together key texts from an international range of Decadent writings and writings about Decadence, many of them previously hard to find and some freshly translated from French, German, Italian, and - in a special section on ancient Roman antecedents - from Latin. The selection of texts and extracts, more fully annotated than in other sources, includes key Decadent manifestos and declarations of principle by Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde; poems by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Symons, and many others; extracts from prose fictions by J.K. Huysmans, Aubrey Beardsley, and others; critical denunciations, with more discerning responses to the challenge of Decadence; parodies by Max Beerbohm, among others of Decadent attitudes and styles; and significant extracts from relevant ancient Roman writings by Petronius and Juvenal. The selection and explanatory notes combine to offer university students of literature and culture at all levels, along with teachers and lay enthusiasts, a rich resource for the understanding of Decadence as an elusive idea and as a literary tradition, in its complex evolution from the 1830s to the fin de siècle and beyond.

An Annotated Anthology

Decadence

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and the ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This exciting new volume provides a freshly inclusive account of literature in England in the period before, during, and after the First World War. Chris Baldick places the modernist achievements of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce within the rich context of non-modernist writings across all major genres, allowing 'high' literary art to be read against the background of 'low' entertainment. Looking well beyond the modernist vanguard, Baldick highlights the survival and renewal of realist traditions in these decades of post-Victorian disillusionment. Ranging widely across psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, and children's books, The Modern Movement provides a unique survey of the literature of this turbulent time.

The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement

Surveys a war-haunted, self-consciously disoriented but exceptionally vibrant decade of writing The 1920s emerge in this study as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Chris Baldick's approachable study of the decade sets out a 'map' of the new post-Great-War literary landscape with its unique configuration of genres, settings and character-types. Successive chapters investigate the place of ideas (biological, Freudian, esoteric, and more) in literature; the uses of anachronism and the time-sense of the Twenties; re-shapings of war-memory and war myth into varieties of Twenties 'disillusionment'; and curious connections between crime-writing and comedy in the period. This account moves easily between experimental and more 'traditional' literary tendencies of the decade to discover common obsessions and shared moods of elegiac despair, nervous frivolity and bold irreverence.

Volume 3

Literature of the 1920s: Writers Among the Ruins

The best-selling Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (formerly the Concise dictionary) provides clear, concise, and often witty definitions of the most troublesome literary terms from abjection to zeugma. It is an essential reference tool for students of literature in any language. It is now available in a new and expanded edition and includes increased coverage of new terms from modern critical and theoretical movements, such as feminism, and schools of American poetry, Spanish verse forms, life writing, and crime fiction. It includes extensive coverage of traditional drama, versification, rhetoric, and literary history, as well as updated and extended advice on recommended further reading and a pronunciation guide to more than 200 terms. New to this edition are recommended entry-level web links updated via the Dictionary of Literary Terms companion website.

Robert Morrison

Blackwood's was the most important and influential literary-political journal of its time, and a major institution not just in Scottish letters, but in the development of British and American Romanticism. Intemperate in political polemic and feared for its literary assassinations, the magazine became just as notorious for the shocking power of its fictional offerings. These set a new standard of concentrated dread and precisely calculated alarm, and were to establish themselves as a landmark in the development of the short magazine story. The influence of Blackwood's quickly reached many major authors, including Dickens, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine

The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932

The first general account of Twenties literature in Britain

Writers Among the Ruins

Literature of the 1920s

Presents a coherent and accessible historical account of the major phases of British and American Twentieth-century criticism, from 'decadent' aestheticism to feminist, decontsructonist and post-colonial theories. Special attention is given to new perspectives on Shakesperean criticism, theories of the novel and models of the literary canon. The book will help to define and account for the major developments in literary criticism during this century exploring the full diversity of critical work from major critics such as T S Eliot and F R Leavis to minor but fascinating figures and critical schools. Unlike most guides to modern literary theory, its focus is firmly on developments within the English speaking world.

Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present

Provides explanations of literary terms and includes information on such topics as drama, rhetoric, and textual criticism.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and the ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This exciting new volume provides a freshly inclusive account of literature in England in the period before, during, and after the First World War. Chris Baldick places the modernist achievements of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce within the rich context of non-modernist writings across all major genres, allowing "high" literary art to be read against the background of "low" entertainment. Looking well beyond the modernist vanguard, Baldick highlights the survival and renewal of realist traditions in these decades of post-Victorian disillusionment. Ranging widely across psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, and children's books, The Modern Movement provides a unique survey of the literature of this turbulent time.

Chris Baldick

About

Books

Join the club