Bücher der Reihe Literary Lives

William Shakespeare is the best-known writer in the English-speaking world. Richard Dutton tackles these and other issues which keep Shakespeare, the most influential literary life in literary history, at the centre of our cultural life today.

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison-fiction, non-fiction, and other-drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts, Toni Morrison: A Literary Life, second edition provides an overview of Morrison's intellectual growth as an artist.

Despite all the studies devoted to William Faulkner, he continues to be variously perceived. Focussing on his fiction, this study of Faulkner's multifaceted literary life explores the distinctive blend of continuity and innvoation that characterizes his novels and looks at the extensive and varied reactions they have elicited.

With special attention to Emily Dickinson's growth into a poet, this literary biographical study charts Dickinson's hard-won brilliance as she worked, largely alone, to become the unique American woman writer of the nineteenth century.

This Literary Life draws extensively from the playwright's correspondences, notebooks, and archival papers to offer an original angle to the discussion of Williams's life and work, and the times and circumstances that helped produce it.

Walt Whitman: A Literary Life highlights two major influences on Whitman's poetry and life: the American Civil War and his economic condition. In addition to establishing Whitman's attention to the Civil War through journalism and memoirs, the book takes the approach of following Whitman's life through his poems.

There is discussion of her most famous series including the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, Malory Towers and Noddy, but attention is also given to lesser-known works including the family stories she published to acclaim in the 1940s and early 1950s, as well as her attempts to become a dramatist.

This book provides an accessible account of the poet and politician Andrew Marvell's life (1621-1678) and of the great events which found reflection in his work and in which he and his writings eventually played a part.

A reading of the oeuvre of Toni Morrison - fiction, non-fiction, and other - drawing extensively from her many interviews as well as her primary texts. The author aligns Morrison's novels with the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, assessing her works as among the most innovative, and most significant, worldwide, of the past fifty years.

Wilkie Collins: A Literary Life draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors. The book takes in Collins's notoriously complicated private life as well as his work as a professional author in the changing world of Victorian publishing.

This book charts the major events of Stoker's life, including friendships with many of the major figures of the age and as manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum, with his literary career. It offers critical evaluation of Dracula and of Stoker's lesser-known works, yielding much interest when reinserted into their original cultural contexts.

Matthew Arnold, the foremost Victorian 'man of letters', forged a unique literary career, first as an important post-Romantic poet and then as a prose writer who profoundly influenced the formation of modern literary and cultural studies.

A new title in Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series, this is a biographical narrative of Graham Greene's literary career.

Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens's literary life and his working life as insurance executive, outlining the personal, historical and publishing contexts that shaped his writing career, and suggesting how awareness of these contexts throws new light on the poems.

This literary biographical study examines the life and works of the mid-Victorian woman novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell, whose popularity is now well established.

A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time.

In Virginia Woolf's life, writing was the activity that mattered more than anything else: she would not have survived without it. John Mepham argues that she never settled on one way of writing because she never settled on one view of life.

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves - to spread over and flop and roll about. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

This work relates Hardy's life to his career, his methodological preparation during the first 30 years of his life for that career, the writing of his 14 published novels and the fame they brought him. It also offers a culmination of his life as a writer.

George Eliot (Marian Evans) as a writer of fiction is the central theme of this literary life.

This largely chronological study of Iris Murdoch's literary life begins with her fledgling publications at Badminton School and Oxford, and her Irish heritage. It moves through the novels of the next four decades and concludes with an account of the biographical, critical and media attention given to her life and work since her death in 1999.

This book situates John Clare's long, prolific but often badly neglected literary life within the wider cultural histories of the Regency and earlier Victorian periods. The second half recreates asylum culture and places Clare's performances as Regency boxers and Lord Byron within this bleak new world.

This volume replaces the traditional image of George Herbert as meditative recluse with a portrait of the poet as engaged throughout his life with the religion, politics and society of his time.

Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s.

This is a study of the forces and influences that shaped Kipling's work, including his unusual family background, his role as the laureate of empire and the deaths of two of his children, and of his complex relations with a literary world that first embraced and then rejected him.

Gary Waller surveys Spenser's career in terms of the material conditions of its production - the often overlooked material factors of race, gender, class, agency - and the resonant 'places' which influenced his career - court, church, nation, colony.

A Literary life of William Makepeace Thackeray offers a new perspective on the relation between Thackeray's life and his novels.

This is the first new complete literary biography of H G Wells for thirty years, and the first to encompass his entire career as a writer, from the science fiction of the 1890s through his fiction and non-fiction writing all the way up to his last publication in 1946.