While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwina€?s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetr
William Cowper (1731–1800) is one of the most interesting of late eighteenth-century poets. His poetry is notable as heralding a simpler and more natural style than the classical style of Pope and his imitators, and thus prefiguring the profound innovations of Romanticism. Though Cowper himself has attracted attention as either a religious maniac or a lovably domestic character, his most important poetry has been neglected. This book, which was originally published in 1983, is the first complete critical study of his major long poem The Task. Furthermore, by carefully examining the procedures whereby an autobiographical element is introduced into the poem, the author shows how the concerns and techniques of The Task influenced the major autobiographical poem of the Romantic period, Wordsworth's The Prelude. The connection between the two poems had often been acknowledged in passing, but prior to this work The Task had not been surveyed in sufficient detail to establish the full weight
The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the detective fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women and black detectives, crime on film and TV, police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form. The collection, by an international team of established specialists, offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading. The volume aims to ensure that its readers will be grounded in the history of crime fiction and its critical reception.
Romantic Atheism explores the links between English Romantic poetry and the first burst of outspoken atheism in Britain from the 1780s onwards. Martin Priestman examines the work of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats in their most intellectually radical periods, establishing the depth of their engagement with such discourses, and in some cases their active participation. Equal attention is given to less canonical writers: such poet-intellectuals as Erasmus Darwin, Sir William Jones, Richard Payne Knight and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and controversialists including Holbach, Volney, Paine, Priestley, Godwin, Richard Carlile and Eliza Sharples (these last two in particular representing the close links between punishably outspoken atheism and radical working-class politics). Above all, the book conveys the excitement of Romantic atheism, whose dramatic appeals to new developments in politics, science and comparative mythology lend it a protean energy belied by the common
This book gives a historical and critical introduction to the genre of crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first detective story The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 to the present day. It concentr
