Product Description: Is Shakespeare any Good? reveals why certain literary works and authors are treated as superior to others, and questions the literary establishment’s criteria for creating an imperium of “great” writers. Enables readers to articulate and formulate their own arguments about the quality of literature – including works that convention forbids us to dislike Dismantles the claims of academic criticism – particularly Theory – to tell us anything useful about why we like or appreciate literature Challenges and shatters many longstanding beliefs about literature and its evaluation Poses serious questions about the value of literature, and studying literature, and presents these in a lively and entertainingly provocative manner...read more

Product Description: Novelists, poets, and playwrights live double lives. When they fall out with each other they seem to do so with great passion. This highly entertaining book looks at some of the most complex friendships and enmities in literary history and examines the dramatic effects on literature itself...read more

Product Description: 'Concrete', 'pattern' or 'shaped' poems are well documented as experimental curiosities. While giving some attention to this sub-genre the book shifts the focus to the ways in which visual form manifests itself in 'traditional' verse, examining poems by Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot, Olson, T...read more

Martin Amis's life could itself provide the formula for an enthralling work of fiction. Son of one of the most popular and best-loved novelists of the post-War era, he has forged a groundbreaking manner of writing that owes nothing to the style of his father, nor indeed to anyone else. He relished and recorded the bizarre, turbulent atmosphere of Britain and the US during the 1970s and 80s, arguably the transformative period of the late 20th century. No other contemporary writer has proved so magnetic for the popular press: he has, despite himself, achieved celebrity status. Of late, his reputation as a novelist has been matched by his outspoken, challenging writing on contemporary global politics, and he has earned the status as the Orwell of the early 21st century. Martin Amis offers the real Martin Amis, a cabinet of contrasts: tortured, eloquently aloof, kind, obsessive, loved by women, a dedicated family man, often the architect of his own undoing, and a literary genius. Moreover, this fascinating biography discloses the autobiographical thread that runs through Amis's books. Richard Bradford has talked with Amis at length, questioned him on his childhood, his private history, his opinions and the inspiration for his fiction, and these exchanges are supplemented by interviews with a large number of his friends and fellow writers. Praise for Richard Bradford's previous titles: Praise for Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis: 'Nearly all critical biographies relate the work to the life - insidiously, tendentiously, helplessly. Richard Bradford is different: he does it convincingly, and with vigour. The result is an original and stimulating book'. Martin Amis 'I found Bradford's approach refreshing. Rare among literary academics he writes clearly, doesn't show off and knows a lot about his subject. He presents a fascinating chronicle of the development of Amis's brilliant ear for speech...He also brings out the full extent of the symbiosis between Amis and his best friend Philip Larkin: in a way Larkin invented Amis.' Craig Brown 'At his better moments Bradford...rises to Amis's stylistic level.' Humphrey Carpenter

Product Description: Richard Bradford’s new introduction to poetry combines definitions, context and literary theory to addresses and answer the slippery question ‘what is poetry?'. The book provides a compact history of English poetry from the 16th century to the present day, alongside coverage of all the major critical and theoretical approaches to verse...read more

Product Description: This volume of more than twenty essays reflects the intersections between biography, autobiography and literature. Several pieces focus upon the contentious sub-genre of literary biography, while others examine the autobiographical threads that are detachable in literary writing and a variety of other forms...read more

Product Description: Teaching Theory offers a selection of essays on the pragmatics, benefits and shortcomings of Theory as a key aspect of literature teaching in universities. They range from reflective discussions of Theory as an intellectual challenge for undergraduates to accounts of the day-to-day problems of planning and teaching courses and implementing Theory...read more

Product Description: When Philip Larkin's "letters" were published in 1992, the poet's enemies seized on the new disclosures with a frenzy unseen since the McCarthy era. What had previously been regarded only as potential inclination hinted at in his poems—misogyny and xenophobia in particular—were now indisputable facts, and since then Larkin's reputation as a poet has been tarnished by his image as a human being...read more

Product Description: Written with the close cooperation of Alan Sillitoe himself, The Life of a Long Distance Writer is not only the definitive work on the legendary writer in his 80th birthday year, it also promises to be perhaps the most controversial literary biography of the last decade...read more

The Novel Now is an intelligent and engaging survey of contemporary British fiction. Discusses familiar names such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter and compares them with more recent authors, including David Mitchell, Ali Smith, A.L. Kennedy, Matt Thorne, Nicola Barker, and Toby Litt Incorporates original coverage of subgenres such as chick lit, lad lit, gay fiction, crime fiction, and the historical novel Discusses the ways in which notions of regional identity and tribalist views have surfaced in UK and Irish fiction, and how post-Imperial sensibility has become a feature of the ‘British’ novel Situates contemporary fiction within its socio-cultural and literary contexts.

When his father joins the Navy in World War II, Josh's mother packs him off to New Mexico for the duration

When his father joins the Navy in World War II, Josh's mother packs him off to New Mexico for the duration

Product Description: A comprehensive survey of Restoration and 18th-century writings on metre and poetic form. The study focuses mainly on the debates caused by the perceived differences between the couplet and blank verse, and provides a survey of the techniques and findings of our 17th- and 18th-century precursors...read more

Product Description: Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind, and his fictionalized versions of both...read more

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There is a crying need for an accessible, comprehensive guide to John Milton for the thousands of students who make their way through his poetry every year on literary survey and seventeenth century literature courses. Where many previous guides have dragged their way through Paradise Lost, Richard Bradford brings Milton to life with an overview of his life, contexts, work and the relationship between these, and of the main critical issues surrounding his work.

Product Description: An engaging study of Kingsley Amis, literary technician and popular story storyteller covering all his work from Lucky Jim to The Biographer's Moustache.

Product Description: Richard Bradford provides a definitive introductory guide to modern critical ideas on literary style and stylistics. It will provide students with a basic grasp of stylistics and literary analysis.This comprehensive and accessible guidebook for undergraduates examines:* the terminology of literary form* how literary style has evolved since the sixteenth century* the role of stylistics in twentieth century criticism* the discipline of stylistics from classical rhetoric to post-structuralism* the relationship between literary style and its historical context* style and gender* examples of poems, plays and novels from Shakespeare to the present day...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A single-volume comprehensive introduction to English literature. Brings together 30 units of study, organized into three major parts: the basics of structure and criticism; chronology; and critical theories and perspectives. This is the first book to fill the gap between introductory studies of single authors, genres and periods, and standard references such as handbooks and glossaries...read more

A Californian intent on establishing his own small empire amid the gold mines of southern Africa, Frederick Burnham writes of his family's travels across strange territories and their struggle to wrest natural resources from the native population.

Product Description: In Roman Jakobson Richard Bradford reasserts the value of Jakobson's work, arguing that he has a great deal to offer contemporary critical theory and providing a critical appraisal the sweep of Jakobson's career. Bradford re-establishes Jakobson's work as vital to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetry...read more

Product Description: This introductory book takes the reader through literary history from the Renaissance to Postmodernism, and considers individual texts as paradigms which can both reflect and unsettle their broader linguistic and cultural contexts...read more