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  3. Literature in Context

Understanding of literary texts can be greatly enhanced by an appreciation of the context within which their authors lived and worked. Each of these volumes focuses on an individual writer, offering lively, accessible and relatively short essays, by leading scholars, on the many contexts - literary, political, intellectual, social and cultural - that have a bearing on his or her work. Biographical and literary influences on the writer, publishing history and the creative afterlife of the work are also addressed. The first volumes in the series include major writers from Ben Jonson to James Joyce, from Milton to Joseph Conrad. Future volumes will focus on Chaucer, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Marcel Proust, among many others. Each volume offers comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.

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83 results in Literature in Context

Page 5 of 5

T. S. Eliot in Context
  • Edited by Jason Harding
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    31 March 2011
  • T. S. Eliot's work demands much from his readers. The more the reader knows about his allusions and range of cultural reference, the more rewarding are his poems, essays and plays. This book is carefully designed to provide an authoritative and coherent examination of those contexts essential to the fullest understanding of his challenging and controversial body of work. It explores a broad range of subjects relating to Eliot's life and career; key literary, intellectual, social and historical contexts; as well as the critical reception of his oeuvre. Taken together, these chapters sharpen critical appreciation of Eliot's writings and present a comprehensive, composite portrait of one of the twentieth century's pre-eminent men of letters. Drawing on original research, T. S. Eliot in Context is a timely contribution to an exciting reassessment of Eliot's life and works, and will provide a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, students and general readers.

Samuel Johnson in Context
  • Edited by Jack Lynch
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    10 November 2011
  • Few authors benefit from being set in their contemporary context more than Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson in Context is a guide to his world, offering readers a comprehensive account of eighteenth-century life and culture as it relates to his work. Short, lively and eminently readable chapters illuminate not only Johnson's own life, writings and career, but the literary, critical, journalistic, social, political, scientific, artistic, medical and financial contexts in which his works came into being. Written by leading experts in Johnson and in eighteenth-century studies, these chapters offer both depth and range of information and suggestions for further study and research. Richly illustrated, with a chronology of Johnson's life and works and an extensive bibliography, this book is a major new work of reference on eighteenth-century culture and the age of Johnson.

James Joyce in Context
  • Edited by John McCourt
  • Published online:
    14 July 2009
    Print publication:
    12 February 2009
  • This collection of original, cohesive and concise essays charts the vital contextual backgrounds to Joyce's life and writing. The volume begins with a chronology of Joyce's publishing history, an analysis of his various biographies and a study of his many published and unpublished letters. It goes on to examine how his works were received in the main twentieth-century critical and theoretical schools. Most importantly, it places Joyce within multiple Irish, British and European contexts, providing a lively sense of the varied and changing world in which he lived, which formed him, and from which he wrote. The essays collectively show how Joyce was rooted in his times, how he is both a product and a critic of his multiple contexts, and how important he remains to the world of literature, criticism and culture.

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