Best of
British-Literature

1994

What a Carve Up!


Jonathan Coe - 1994
    A tour de force of menace, malicious comedy, and torrential social bile, this book marks the American debut of an extraordinary writer.

In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House


Denton Welch - 1994
    Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure." Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, "In Youth Is Pleasure."

Knowledge of Angels


Jill Paton Walsh - 1994
    It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

Tales from a Village School


Miss Read - 1994
    94 line drawings.

Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Wordsworth Poetry) (Wordsworth Poetry Library)


Thomas Hardy - 1994
    Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one who is widely loved. He speaks with directness, humanity and humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike.

The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer's Iliad


Christopher Logue - 1994
    Carrying the Homeric world into our own, Logue's language is at once musical, profoundly tender, and frighteningly graphic. With cinematic speed, disarming confidence, and lyrical care, Logue gives us a reading of classic literature that makes unquestionably clear its relevance to our own time.

Great Sonnets


Paul NegriJohn Keats - 1994
    Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Longfellow, Yeats, Frost, Poe, etc. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Great Poets of the Romantic Age


Michael Sheen - 1994
    One of the most popular areas of audiobooks -- spoken poetic form -- evokes emotions and sensations by bringing the voice of the poet to life in an appropriately intimate way, directly to the ear and mind of the listener.This anthology contains the works of some of the greatest poets of the Romantic Age, including Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Clare.

Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM


Duncan Wu - 1994
    This magnificent Anthology is now available as a package with David Miall and Duncan Wu's revolutionary Romanticism: The CD-ROM. Both works reflect recent developments in Romantic scholarship, particularly in the expansion of the literary canon. Alongside unabridged texts from canonical writers are works by women and writers in other genres, including political and philosophical writers, diarists, painters, broadside-balladeers, reviewers and letter-writers. Additions for the second edition of the Anthology include Wordsworth's The Ruined Cottage, The Pedlar, Michael, The Brothers, and extracts from The Five-Book Prelude, and the Fourteen-Book Prelude; Coleridge's This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Kubla Khan, The Pains of Sleep, Dejection: An Ode, The Eolian Harp, and Frost at Midnight; Byron's Stanzas to Augusta, Epistle to Augusta and Don Juan Canto II.Substantial editorial material includes an introduction exploring the phenomenon of romanticism; detailed annotations and author headnotes providing biographical details; lists of significant recent criticism and in many cases brief critical introductions. The unique, easy to use CD-ROM both incorporates the anthology (in its first edition, including Wordsworth's Prelude (1805) in its entirety) and provides substantial selections from over ninety other writers. Built-in hypertext links enable readers to experience the intertextuality of writing during this period and understand the cultural context in which the texts werecreated. The CD-ROM offers a huge range of resources including: More than 1200 high-quality graphics, including illustrations, prints and paintings; scenes from the English Lake District, the Alps, and the ruins of Rome and Pompeii; photographs of landscapes and detailed maps. Chronologies. A biographic dictionary of the key figures of the period. A 'tours' feature, which enables teachers or students to build their own routes through the CD-ROM or to take preset introductory tours e.g. through 'slavery'. Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM is the most exciting resource available for students and researchers discovering the Romantic Period.

Encyclopedia Sherlockiana: The Complete A-To-Z Guide to the World of the Great Detective


Matthew E. Bunson - 1994
    This first comprehensive compendium to all the stories, films, characters, and clues from the Canon provides synopses of every case in the stories and novels, profiles of notable figures, descriptions of the real cases that inspired Conan Doyle, and more. 113 illustrations. Maps.

The Complete Works of William Shakespere: Volumes #1 & 2 (2 BOOK SET) (1 & 2)


J.E. Nourse - 1994
    

The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England: Its Archaeology and Literature


H.R. Ellis Davidson - 1994
    The first part of the book, a careful study of the disposition of swords found in peat bogs, in graves, lakes and rivers, yields information on religious and social practices. The second is concerned with literary sources, especially Beowulf.

Beyond The Rainbow


Christine Marion Fraser - 1994
    

The Alan Garner Omnibus


Alan Garner - 1994
    Omnibus of Elidor, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath

Orlando: A Biography: Film Screenplay


Sally Potter - 1994
    While addressing contemporary concerns about gender and identity, the screenplay adapts the original story to give it a striking cinematic form.

Four Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto; Vathek; The Monk; Frankenstein


Horace Walpole - 1994
    Crammed with catastrophe, terror, and ghostly interventions, the novel was an immediate success, and influenced numberous followers. These include William Beckford's Vathek (1786), which alternates grotesque comedy with scenes of exotic magnificence in the story of the ruthless Caliph Vathek's journey to damnation. The Monk (1796), by Matthew Lewis, is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest, set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid. Frankenstein (1818, 1831) is Mary Shelley's disturbing and perennially popular tale of a young student who learns the secret of giving life to a creature made from human relics, with horrific consequences.This collection illustrates the range and attraction of the gothic novel. Extreme and sensational, each of the four printed here is alos a powerful psychological story of isolation and monomania.

Rockaby and Other Short Pieces


Samuel Beckett - 1994
    We find in Beckett's masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.

A Mingled Measure: Diaries, 1953-1972


James Lees-Milne - 1994
    The author has ceased to work full-time for the National Trust and we now see him in kaleidoscopically varied company, including Colette, Oswald Mosley and John Betjeman.

The Works of The Earl of Rochester


John Wilmot - 1994
    Much of Rochester's verse remained unpublished for many years, as it was considered too sexually bold and outrageous, but his work is much more than that of a Restoration profligate and libertine. His perceptive scepticism produced poems of great insight and satirical wit, and he could be a tender lyricist.David Vieth's edition of his work is scholarly and thorough, with an historical introduction and extensive bibliography and notes.

Plays 2: Breaking the Silence / Playing With Trains / She's Been Away / Century


Stephen Poliakoff - 1994
    Her character is Lillian, thrust into a frightening and incomprehensible world after sixty years in a mental institution." (Weekend Guardian); Century: "If all British films are to be costume dramas then let them all be as intelligent and imaginative as Stephen Poliakoff's Century. The strength of the film lies not just in the strong performances or unusual storyline but in images that conflict with our idea of what the past looks like…Century deserves to be celebrated for its effortless integration of contemporary issues - immigration, genetic engineering - with a convincing historical story." (Independent)

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp


Michael Powell - 1994
    The plot is juxtaposed to that of the British officer's thrice lost love - which introduces a disturbing undercurrent of romantic pessimism into what might otherwise seem a nostalgic chronicle. This volume also contains documentary material relevant to Powell and Pressburger's struggle to get the film made in war-torn Britain.

Virginia Woolf


James King - 1994
    All her life Woolf struggled with sadness that threatened to overwhelm and destroy her. In many ways her writings were attempts to counteract these powerful feelings and to grasp the healing forces of life. This was her central reason for writing: to investigate and curb her fascination with death and, at the same time, to capture the vitality of existence. The paradox was that such affirmation inevitably brought her back to the subjects she knew best: the destructiveness of men, the burdens of the past, and the fragility of life. In this absorbing biography James King examines how the raw material of Woolf's daily existence was transformed into art, and he pays close attention to her search for forms of writing that encompass a new feminist aesthetic. Virginia Woolf sheds new light on this daring, impetuous, tormented artist, who strove relentlessly to find the right words to capture life's insubstantiality and its vibrancy.

The Carnival Trilogy: Carnival, the Infinite Rehearsal, and the Four Banks of the River of Space


Wilson Harris - 1994
    Playing on carnival’s subversive potential in reenacting received traditions, these novels are rewritings, respectively,of Dante’s Paradiso, Goethe’s Faust, and Homer’s Odyssey. Apart from alluding to these three representative pieces of the Western literary canon, the trilogy also addresses the role of science. In passages reminiscent (in effect, if not in style) of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Harris shows how in an age of rapidly shifting analytical paradigms in the realm of science, this realm has moved ever closer qualitatively to the realm of traditional storytelling and one of its major protagonists, the Anancy trickster figure.

Coleridge's Philosophy: The Logos As Unifying Principle


Mary Ann Perkins - 1994
    She pays particular attention to his later writings, some of which are still unpublished. She suggests that the accusations of plagiarism and of muddled, abstruse metaphysics which have been levelled at him may be challenged by a thorough reading of his work in which its unifying principle is revealed. She explores the various meanings of the term logos, a recurrent theme in every area of Coleridge's thought--philosophy, religion, natural science, history, political and social criticism, literary theory, and psychology. Coleridge was responding to the concerns of his own time, a revolutionary age in which increasing intellectual and moral fragmentation and confusion seemed to him to threaten both individuals and society. Drawing on the whole of Western intellectual history, he offered a ground for philosophy which was relational rather than mechanistic. He is one of those few thinkers whose work appears to become more interesting and his perceptions more acute as the historical gulf widens. This book is a contribution to the reassessment that he deserves.

Christina Rossetti


Jan Marsh - 1994
    Photos.