Literary theory

Every four or five years Britain's most prominent dramatist pulls out all the stops and writes a major stage play of his own.

An exploration of how key modern writers challenged conventional ways of characterizing selfhood, thus developing a discourse expressive of the subtleties of experience in a post-Freudian world long before the self-representation theories of the post-structuralists and post-modernists.

A study that examines the relationship between tragic drama of the late 19th and 20th centuries and present-day society.

One of the subjects of deepest and most enduring interest to Henry James was the creative experience of writers and critics.

Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent is a fascinating and lucid exploration of the seminal writings of four eminent French structuralists that sheds new light on influential theoretical texts.

Writing about changes in the notion of womanhood, Denise Riley examines, in the manner of Foucault, shifting historical constructions of the category of "e;women"e; in relation to other categories central to concepts of personhood: the soul, the mind, the body, nature, the social.

Katherine Mansfield was a formidable critic: astute, witty and something more - she had, as Middleton Murry put it, an extraordinary style and critical verve, mastery and 'sureness of touch'.

Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Heywood, Webster and Fletcher are playwrights of the Jacobean stage whose outstanding literary achievements have to some extent been obscured or misunderstood in Shakespeare's shadow.