{"title":"The Oxford English Literary History","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"oxford-english-literary-history-volume-12-the-last-of-england-book-randall-stevenson-9780198184232","title":"The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 12: The Last of England?","description":"English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the 60s, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety and inventiveness of earlier years. As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth-century to shadows of war and loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general. Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful description of writing in the later twentieth-century a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognised. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49625794085137,"sku":"GOR005475478","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52476128887057,"sku":"NLS9780198184232","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":54068705886481,"sku":"GOR010366476","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0198184239.jpg?v=1786614116"},{"product_id":"oxford-english-literary-history-volume-2-1350-1547-reform-and-cultural-revolutio-book-james-simpson-9780199265534","title":"The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 2: 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution","description":"Heralding a new era in literary studies, the Oxford English Literary History breaks the mould of traditional approaches to the canon by focusing on the contexts in which the authors wrote and how their work was shaped by the times in which they lived. Each volume offers a fresh, ground-breaking re-assessment of the authors, their works, and the events and ideas which shaped the literary voice of their age. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, under the general-editorship of Jonathan Bate, the Oxford English Literary History is essential reading for everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English literature. Unlike most medieval literary histories, which end with the coming of the Tudors, this volume continues into the mid-sixteenth century, and registers the impact of Henry VIII's cultural revolution and the linking of Church and State after the break with Rome. Although potent traditions praise both 'Reformation' and 'Renaissance' as moments of liberation, this book argues the reverse. Simpson shows that the emergent centralized culture narrowed and simplified the literary possibilities that had been enjoyed by late medieval writers. The consequences for literature, and even for the varieties of English in which it was written, were dramatic. From roughly 1350, where the volume starts, a wide range of literary kinds flourished, in a wide range of dialects. Many of these texts can be described as a mixed commonwealth of styles and genres, such as Langland's Piers Plowman, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the dramatic 'mystery' cycles, and Malory's Works. In the sixteenth century this stylistic variety gave way to a literary practice that prized coherence and unity above all. Some kinds of writing, especially romance, survived. Others, such as Langland's brand of ecclesiology, the 'Aristotelian' politics of Gower and Hoccleve, and the feminine visionary mode of Julian of Norwich, became untenable. Religious cycle drama outlived the 1530s but was suppressed within the next forty years. Sixteenth-century writing, by figures such as Wyatt, Surrey, and the dramatist John Bale, emerges in this book as the product of profoundly divided writers, torn between their commitment to the new order and their awareness of its painful, often destructive strictures.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50038201450769,"sku":"GOR004364978","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50345615294737,"sku":"CIN0199265534VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50346466115857,"sku":"CIN0199265534G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000170414353,"sku":"NIN9780199265534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52130921677073,"sku":"NLS9780199265534","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52498855919889,"sku":"GOR014541043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199265534.jpg?v=1786962511"},{"product_id":"oxford-english-literary-history-volume-10-1910-1940-the-modern-movement-book-chris-baldick-9780199288342","title":"The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 10: 1910-1940: The Modern Movement","description":"This exciting new volume provides a freshly inclusive account of literature in England in the period before, during, and after the First World War. Chris Baldick places the modernist achievements of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce within the rich context of non-modernist writings across all major genres, allowing 'high' literary art to be read against the background of 'low' entertainment. Looking well beyond the modernist vanguard, Baldick highlights the survival and renewal of realist traditions in these decades of post-Victorian disillusionment. Ranging widely across psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, and children's books, The Modern Movement provides a unique survey of the literature of this turbulent time.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50815286182161,"sku":"GOR007703234","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51304615739665,"sku":"NIN9780199288342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52353482227985,"sku":"NLS9780199288342","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199288348.jpg?v=1786615138"},{"product_id":"oxford-english-literary-history-volume-13-1948-2000-the-internationalization-of-book-bruce-king-9780199288366","title":"The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 13: 1948-2000: The Internationalization of English Literature","description":"In the future, what will 'English Literary History' mean? A literary history of England, or one with much looser boundaries, defined only by a communality of language, not by location or history? In this, the last volume in the Oxford English Literary History, Bruce King discusses the literature written by those who have chosen to make England their home since 1948. With decolonization following World War II, and the growth of large immigrant communities in England, came a wave of colonial, postcolonial, and immigrant writers whose entry onto the British cultural landscape forces us to consider what it is to be British, English, or national now that England is multiracial and part of a global economy.King addresses these new trends in English literature and the questions they raise in the first wide-ranging and comprehensive account of immigrant literature set in a social context. Ranging through Black and Asian British prose, poetry, and drama, and writers including V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith, King reveals the development of the literature from writing about immigration to becoming English. Now that the literature of England includes Sri Lankans, Egyptians, and British Nigerians, does this mean that we can no longer talk of the English nation as a cultural unit? King concludes persuasively that it does not. We have not seem the demise of national cultures; rather, a new, accomplished, and socially significant body of writing in England is influenced by the interaction between foreign cultures and British traditions. This bold and challenging account of British culture will shape debate for future generations.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50977606500625,"sku":"GOR007611178","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51304611545361,"sku":"NIN9780199288366","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52679957283089,"sku":"NLS9780199288366","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0199288364.jpg?v=1786615629"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/the-oxford-english-literary-history-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}