Great Expectations is one of the best-selling Victorian novels of our time. No Dickens work, with the exception of A Christmas Carol, has been adapted more for both film and television. It has been as
In the 400 years since The Tempest was first staged, millions of words have been written about it. Critics, directors and actors have interpreted it in widely different ways and developed theories ran
Writers, playwrights and philosophers have alike been fascinated by Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. The contradictions in her character, said the writer Anna Jameson, fuse “into one brilliant imp
For better or worse, Far from the Madding Crowd was the novel Victorian readers wanted him to write over and over again. One early reviewer was delighted by the pastoral elements: “when the shee
What explains the special quality of A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Samuel Johnson called the play “wild and fantastical”, noting how “all the parts in their various modes are well
Lear is too much. There’s too much to stomach, an overdoing of massive wickednesses which rightly provoked perhaps the most famous reaction to King Lear ever, Dr Samuel Johnson’s horror in
Today Twelfth Night is considered to be Shakespeare’s greatest romantic comedy. Written at roughly the same time as Hamlet (1600), it draws from its comic predecessors in clearly identifiable wa
Who would have expected Jane Austen to be up-to-date on gun technology or Virginia Woolf to recognise the class politics of plumbing? Austen and Woolf are materialists, this book argues. 'Things' in t
Challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism In this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary h
Macbeth may well be the most terrifying play in the English language, but it hasn’t always been seen that way. It has divided critics more deeply than any other Shakespearian tragedy – and
Romeo and Juliet is routinely called “the world’s greatest love story”, as though it is all about romance. The play features some of the most lyrical passages in all of drama, and th
Jane Eyre, published on 16th October 1847, was an instant popular success. More than 150 years later, it still powerfully affects its readers with all the charge of a new-minted work. It is easy to fo
Wuthering Heights is one of the most written-about novels in the English language. Famous for the dark and passionate world Emily Brontë creates, and for the doomed relationship between Catherine
Hard Times is Dickens’s shortest novel. Some early critics argued that it lacked the genius of the characterisation and humour that mark his greatest works. One of the 20th century’s leadi
In his first tetralogy of history plays (Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III), Shakespeare offered the most extensive dramatic sequence since the great days of ancient Greek drama in Athens.
Julius Caesar stands at the changing of the tide in Shakespeare’s career. By 1599, when he wrote the play, he had penned only two experimental tragedies (Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus),
In the four centuries since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, Hamlet has almost always been regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest play. This is not surprising. As Barbara Everett has observed, Ham
This book asserts that Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was a major precursor of W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1939), and shows how Wilde’s image and intellect set in train a powerful influence within Yeats’s creative
UQP celebrates 70 years of publishing the best Australian writing with a unique anthology that showcases the diversity of the Australian literary landscape.Featuring 25 of the greatest Australian writ
This book approaches Byron from a completely new angle: no longer seen in terms of his status as a celebrity and a star on the book-selling market, Byron is instead seen as an outsider both in Regency
