European Studies: English and Irish Studies (27)

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life

• William F. Halloran

Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Making the Void Fruitful: Yeats as Spiritual Seeker and Petrarchan Lover

• Patrick J. Keane

Shedding fresh light on the life and work of William Butler Yeats—widely acclaimed as the major English-language poet of the twentieth century—this new study by leading scholar Patrick J. Keane questions established understandings of the Irish poet’s long fascination with the occult: a fixation that repelled literary contemporaries T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden, but which enhanced Yeats’s vision of life and death.

• Biography
• Education
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Women and Gender Studies

Mary Warnock: Ethics, Education and Public Policy in Post-War Britain

• Philip Graham

This biography illuminates the life and thought of Baroness Mary Warnock, whose active years spanned the second half of the twentieth century, a period during which opportunities for middle-class women rapidly and vastly improved.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature
• Performing Arts

Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture

• Morag Josephine Grant

In Auld Lang Syne: A Song and its Culture, M. J. Grant explores the history of this iconic song, demonstrating how its association with ideas of fellowship, friendship and sociality has enabled it to become so significant for such a wide range of individuals and communities around the world.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies

A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt

• David Yeandle

'A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt' is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Middlemarch: Epigraphs and Mirrors

• Adam Roberts

In Middlemarch, George Eliot draws a character passionately absorbed by abstruse allusion and obscure epigraphs. Casaubon’s obsession is a cautionary tale, but Adam Roberts nonetheless sees in him an invitation to take Eliot’s use of epigraphy and allusion seriously, and this book is an attempt to do just that.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Jane Austen: Reflections of a Reader

• Nora Bartlett
• Jane Stabler

This volume presents an exhilarating and insightful collection of essays on Jane Austen – distilling the author’s deep understanding and appreciation of Austen’s works across a lifetime. The volume is both intra- and inter-textual in focus, ranging from perceptive analysis of individual scenes to the exploration of motifs across Austen’s fiction.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 3: 1900-1905

• William F. Halloran

Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Health
• Women and Gender Studies

Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century

• Lucy Pollard

This book vividly presents the story of Margery Spring Rice, an instrumental figure in the movements of women’s health and family planning in the first half of the twentieth century. Margery Spring Rice, née Garrett, was born into a family of formidable female trailblazers – niece of physician and suffragist Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and of Millicent Fawcett, a leading suffragist and campaigner for equal rights for women. Margery Spring Rice continued this legacy with her co-founding of the North Kensington birth control clinic in 1924, three years after Marie Stopes founded the first clinic in Britain.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod": Volume 2: 1895-1899

• William F. Halloran

With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf'

• Edward Pettit

The image of a giant sword melting stands at the structural and thematic heart of the Old English heroic poem Beowulf. This meticulously researched book investigates the nature and significance of this golden-hilted weapon and its likely relatives within Beowulf and beyond, drawing on the fields of Old English and Old Norse language and literature, liturgy, archaeology, astronomy, folklore and comparative mythology.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Make We Merry More and Less: An Anthology of Medieval English Popular Literature

• Douglas Gray
• Jane Bliss

This anthology offers a fruitful exploration of the boundary between literary and popular culture, and showcases an impressive breadth of literature, including songs, drama, and ballads. Familiar texts such as the visions of Margery Kempe and the Paston family letters are featured alongside lesser-known works, often oral. This striking diversity extends to the language: the anthology includes Scottish literature and original translations of Latin and French texts.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels

• R. H. Winnick

In Tennyson’s Poems: New Textual Parallels, R. H. Winnick identifies more than a thousand previously unknown instances in which Tennyson phrases of two or three to as many as several words are similar or identical to those occurring in prior works by other hands—discoveries aided by the proliferation of digitized texts and the related development of powerful search tools over the three decades since the most recent major edition of Tennyson’s poems was published.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• Media Studies and Journalism

A Fleet Street In Every Town: The Provincial Press in England, 1855-1900

• Andrew Hobbs

'A Fleet Street in Every Town' positions the local paper at the centre of debates on Victorian newspapers, periodicals, reading and publishing. It reorientates our view of the Victorian press away from metropolitan high culture and parliamentary politics, and towards the places where most people lived, loved and read. This is an essential book for anybody interested in nineteenth-century print culture, journalism and reading.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: VOLUME I: 1855–1894

• William F. Halloran

Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Yeats's Legacies: Yeats Annual No. 21

• Warwick Gould

The two great Yeats Family Sales of 2017 and the legacy of the Yeats family’s 80-year tradition of generosity to Ireland’s great cultural institutions provide the kaleidoscope through which these advanced research essays find their theme.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

An Anglo-Norman Reader

• Jane Bliss

This book is an anthology with a difference. It presents a distinctive variety of Anglo-Norman works, beginning in the twelfth century and ending in the nineteenth, covering a broad range of genres and writers, introduced in a lively and thought-provoking way. Facing-page translations, into accessible and engaging modern English, are provided throughout, bringing these texts to life for a contemporary audience.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Dickens’s Working Notes for 'Dombey and Son'

• Tony Laing

This critical edition of the working notes for Dombey and Son (1848) is ideal for readers who wish to know more about Dickens’s craft and creativity. Drawing on the author’s manuscript in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London—and containing hyperlinked facsimiles—Dickens’s Working Notes for Dombey and Son offers a new digital transcription with a fresh commentary by Tony Laing. Unique and innovative, this is the only edition to make Dickens’s working methods visible.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature
• Literature: Comparative Literature

Love and its Critics: From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

• Michael Bryson
• Arpi Movsesian

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Essays in Honour of Eamonn Cantwell: Yeats Annual No. 20

• Warwick Gould

This number of Yeats Annual collects the essays resulting from the University College Cork/ESB International Annual W. B. Yeats Lectures Series (2003-2008) by Roy Foster, Warwick Gould, John Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Bernard O’Donoghue and Helen Vendler. Those that were available in pamphlet form are now collectors’ items, but here is the complete series. These revised essays cover such themes as Yeats and the Refrain, Yeats as a Love Poet, Yeats, Ireland and Europe, the puzzles he created and solved with his art of poetic sequences, and his long and crucial interaction with the emerging T. S. Eliot.

• American and Latin American Studies
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature
• Literature: Comparative Literature

Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict

• Martin Paul Eve

This is a book about the power game currently being played out between two symbiotic cultural institutions: the university and the novel. As the number of hyper-knowledgeable literary fans grows, students and researchers in English departments waiver between dismissing and harnessing voices outside the academy. Meanwhile, the role that the university plays in contemporary literary fiction is becoming increasingly complex and metafictional, moving far beyond the ‘campus novel’ of the mid-twentieth century.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts

• David Atkinson

The first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship, The Anglo-Scottish Ballad addresses topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

Yeats's Mask: Yeats Annual No. 19

• Margaret Mills Harper
• Warwick Gould

A special issue in this renowned research-level series, Yeats Annual 19 explores the concept of the Mask in Yeats’s plays and poems. The volume also includes studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, and the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. As well as ten new reviews focusing on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS series and his correspondence with George Yeats, this volume republishes the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper from the elusive Yeats Annual 1 (1982).

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature

The Living Stream: Yeats Annual No. 18

• Warwick Gould

This special issue of the renowned research-level Yeats Annual offers a tribute to the pioneering Yeats scholar, A. Norman Jeffares. Memories of the man are shared by Seamus Heaney, Christopher Rush and Colin Smythe, while other scholars offer essays on such topics as Yeats and the Colours of Poetry, Yeats’s Shakespeare, Yeats and Seamus Heaney, Raferty’s work of Yeats’s Thoor Ballylee, Edmund Dulac’s portrait of Mrs George Yeats, and The Tower as an anti-Modernist monument. Throughout, the essays are inflected with memories of Jeffares and his critical methods. The volume also includes reviews of recent editions and studies.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• History
• History: International Relations

A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture

• Anthony Cross

Edited by Anthony Cross, a leading authority on Anglo-Russian relations, this collection demonstrates the scope and variety of Russia’s influence on British culture. Moving from the early 1800s – when Byron sent his hero Don Juan to meet Catherine the Great, and an English critic grappled with the challenge of Pushkin – to a series of Russian-themed exhibitions at venues including Crystal Palace and Earls Court, the collection explores British encounters with Russian music, the absorption with Dostoevsky and Chekhov, and Britain’s engagement with Soviet film. Essential reading for anyone with an interest in British and Russian cultures and their complex relationship.

• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Literature
• Performing Arts

The Theatre of Shelley

• Jacqueline Mulhallen

In the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance, Mulhallen provides a meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his ‘closet dramas’ as performable pieces of theatre. As well as discussing Shelley’s stagecraft and analysing performances of his plays from the 1800s to today, the book also offers a detailed account of the theatrical scene of Shelley’s time, including details of the productions Shelley himself saw. Mulhallen reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist.

• Biography
• European Studies
• European Studies: English and Irish Studies
• Law
• Literature

Coleridge's Laws: A Study of Coleridge in Malta

• Barry Hough
• Howard Davis
• Lydia Davis

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one quite short period of his life he held real political power – acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. Meticulously researched, this book provides detailed analysis of the laws drafted by Coleridge, together with the first published translations of them. Drawing upon newly discovered archival materials, the authors shed new light on Coleridge’s sense of political and legal morality, showing how Coleridge’s actions whilst in a position of power differed markedly from the idealism he advocated before taking office.