New Perspectives on British Authors : From William Shakespeare to Graham Greene

Contents: Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Is there a \'Mother\' in this text?. 2. The \'Blackamoor\': The dark stranger. 3. Dryden\'s All for Love and the aesthetics of adaptation. 4. Configuring romanticism: fresh perspectives on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 5. Aridity and rain: Coleridge in perspective. 6. Keats: the brief twilight and the \'Last Oozings\': a medical perspective. 7. Hopkins\'s concept of \'Inscape\' and Anandavardhana\'s theory of \'Dhavani\': a comparative approach. 8. Charioted by Bacchus: the \'Lord of Misrule\' and the carnivalesque in Hardy\'s stories. 9. Hardy\'s return to folk form: a study of Hardy\'s short stories and the Ballad tradition. 10. The traditional English Ballad. 11. The resonating world of Stephen Dedaulus: a study of \'Sound\' and \'Silence\' in a Portrait. 12. \'Driven by a Demon\' a look at Orwell on the centenary year. 13. \'Like [!] The Coral Island\': Lord of the Flies: a study in intertext. 14. Greene\'s The Captain and The Enemy: a post-modern perspective. 15. Monsignor Quixote: writing/riding with the \'Ancestor/s\'.

"The fifteen critical studies included in the book cover a wide spectrum of British canonical authors and texts that represent various genres including the ballad songs, drama, poetry, fiction, short story, non-fictional prose.

The essays bring delightfully fresh perspectives to bear on such rich quarries as Elizabethan drama, neo-classic play, romantic poetry, devotional literature, Victorian novel and short fiction, modernist fiction, twentieth century \'polemical\' prose, postwar dystopia, and postmodernist novel, while encompassing such authors of time winning fame as Shakespeare, Dryden, Coleridge, Keats, Hopkins, Hardy, Joyce, Orwell, Greene, and Golding. The critical perspectives that have been used to address these illustrious authors include the range from feminism to phonoaesthetics, intertextuality to Indian poetics, Bakhtinian carnivalesque to generic studies, \'anxiety of influence\' to postmodern indeterminacy, etc.

These scholarly explorations, which combine thorough research with fresh original insight, will provide both profit and pleasure to scholars as well as general readers interested in the area." (jacket)