Manchester University Press: 1049 books

Featuring modernised spelling and detailed explanatory notes, this anthology of Civil War-era women poets is perfect for students of English literature and early modern studies.

This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

While among the most common of Renaissance genres, the epigram has been largely neglected by scholars and critics: James Doelman's book is the first major study on the Renaissance English epigram since 1947. It combines thorough description of the genre's history and conventions with consideration...

Shakespeare and Spenser: Attractive Opposites is a much-needed volume that brings together ten original papers by the experts, on the relations between Spenser and Shakespeare. There has been much noteworthy work on the linguistic borrowings of Shakespeare from Spenser, but the subject has never before...

Free Will: Art and power on Shakespeare’s stage is a study of theatre and sovereignty that situates Shakespeare’s plays in the contraflow between two absolutisms of early modern England: the aesthetic and the political. Starting from the dramatist’s cringing relations with his princely patrons,...

This is a groundbreaking study of the most important contemporary American novelist, Philip Roth. Reading the author alongside a number of his contemporaries, and focusing particularly on his later fiction, this book offers a highly accessible, informative and persuasive view of Roth as an intellectually...

It has become axiomatic that First World War literature was disenchanted, or disillusioned, and returning combatants were unable to process or communicate that experience. In Writing disenchantment, Andrew Frayn argues that this was not just about the war: non-combatants were just as disenchanted...

Julius Caesar presents a performance history of a controversial play, moving from its 1599 opening all the way into the new millennium with particular emphasis on its twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations on stage and screen. The book tracks the play’s evolution from being a play about...

A pioneering collaboration between leading early modern historians and literary scholars. Chapters by Kenneth Fincham, David Crankshaw and Mary Morrissey analyse the legal structures governing the appointment and remit of chaplains and map their roles and functions within early modern England.

Edmund Spenser famously conceded to his friend Walter Raleigh that his method in The Faerie Queene 'will seeme displeasaunt' to those who would 'rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large.' Spenser's allegory and Elizabethan biblical exegesis is the first...

Drawing on the work of British sculptor Antony Gormley, alongside more traditional literary scholarship, this book argues for new relationships between Chaucer’s poetry and works by others. Chaucer’s playfulness with textual history and chronology anticipates how his own work is figured in later...

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time. Kesson traces Lyly's work in prose fiction and the...

This collection of essays covers a wide range of topics about Ralegh's diversified career and achievements. The essays shed light on less familiar facets such as Ralegh as a father and his representation in the Arts; others re-examine him as poet, historian, and figure of controversy.

Charlotte Brontë: legacies and afterlives is a timely reflection on the persistent fascination and creative engagement with Charlotte Brontë’s life and work. The new essays in this volume, which cover the period from Brontë’s first publication to the twenty-first century, explain why her work...