Deze serie duikt in de werken van gerenommeerde auteurs via deskundige en gepassioneerde analyses van vooraanstaande literatuurcritici. Elk deel biedt een frisse en originele kijk op de creatieve nalatenschap van een schrijver. Het is bedoeld voor lezers die een dieper inzicht zoeken in hun favoriete literaire figuren. De collectie biedt boeiende inzichten voor liefhebbers van literatuur en kritisch denken.
A powerful new account of Hardy's novels by a leading scholar, emphasizing their affirmative elements and their often poetic prose. George Levine provides an overview of Hardy's entire fictional canon, drawing attention to the influence of Charles Darwin on his work and Hardy's own impact on Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
Lively and engaging account of the experience of reading Jane Austen, by leading scholar and novelist.
William Blake (1757‒1827) is one of the most original and influential figures of the Romantic Age, known for his work as an artist, poet and printmaker. Grounding his ideas both in close reading and in the latest scholarship, Saree Makdisi offers an exciting and imaginative approach to reading Blake. By exploring some of the most important themes in Blake's work and connecting them to particular plates from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Makdisi highlights Blake's creative power and the important interplay between images and words. There is a consistent emphasis on the relationship between the material nature of Blake's illuminated books, including the method he used to produce them, and the interpretive readings of the texts themselves. Makdisi argues that the material and formal openness of Blake's work can be seen as the very basis for learning to read in the spirit of Blake.
John Keats (1795-1821), one of the best-loved poets of the Romantic period, is ever alive to words, discovering his purposes as he reads - not only books but also the world around him. Leading Keats scholar Susan J. Wolfson explores the breadth of his works, including his longest ever poem Endymion; subsequent romances, Isabella (a Boccaccio tale with a proto-Marxian edge admired by George Bernard Shaw), the passionate Eve of St Agnes and knotty Lamia; intricate sonnets and innovative odes; the unfinished Hyperion project (Keats's existential rethinking of epic agony); and late lyrics involved with Fanny Brawne, the bright (sometimes dark) star of his last years. Illustrated with manuscript pages, title-pages, and two portraits, Reading John Keats investigates the brilliant complexities of Keats's imagination and his genius in wordplay, uncovering surprises and new delights, and encouraging renewed respect for the power of Keats's thinking and the subtle turns of his writing.