Chapters on the major literary genres, on intellectual, political and institutional contexts, and on film and the visual arts, provide close analyses and a broader set of interpretive narratives. A Chronology and Guide to Further Reading supply valuable orientation within the field. Students will find much-needed help with the difficulties of approaching Modernism, while the essays' original contributions will send scholars back to this volume for stimulating reevaluation.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    This Third Edition contains new thoughts and perspectives throughout.

    Deep in the forests of Wessex, Dunston's solitary existence is shattered when he stumbles on a mutilated corpse. Accused of the murder, Dunston must clear his name and keep the dead man's daughter alive in the face of savage pursuers desperate to prevent a terrible secret from being revealed. Rushing headlong through Wessex, Dunston will need to use all the skills of survival garnered from a lifetime in the wilderness. And if he has any hope of victory against the implacable enemies on their trail, he must confront his long-buried past – becoming the man he once was and embracing traits he had promised he would never return to. The Wolf of Wessex must hunt again; honour and duty demand it. 'A page-turner ... Matthew Harffy tells a great story' Joanna Hickson. 'A breathtaking novel that sweeps the reader into a dark and dangerous world' Paul Fraser Collard. 'Harffy's writing just gets better and better ... He is really proving himself the rightful heir to Gemmell's crown' Jemahl Evans. 'Harffy has a real winner on his hands ... A genuinely superb novel' Steven McKay.

    Encyclopedia covering different versions of the Arthurian cycle, with brief entries for characters, authors, texts, places, and themes.

    And there is no better guide to the dictionary's many wonderments than the former chief editor of the OED, John Simpson. Simpson spent almost four decades of his life immersed in the intricacies of our language, and guides us through its history with charmingly laconic wit. In The Word Detective, an intensely personal memoir and a joyful celebration of English, he weaves a story of how words come into being (and sometimes disappear), how culture shapes the language we use, and how technology has transformed not only the way we speak and write but also how words are made. Throughout, he enlivens his narrative with lively excavations and investigations of individual words -- from deadline to online and back to 101 (yes, it's a word) -- all the while reminding us that the seemingly mundane words (can you name the four different meanings of ma?) are often the most interesting ones. But Simpson also reminds us of the limitations of language: spending his days in the OED's house of words, his family at home is forced to confront the challenges of wordlessness. A brilliant and deeply humane expedition through the world of words, The Word Detective will delight and inspire any lover of language.

    The Last Boleyn tells the story of the rise and fall of the Boleyns, one of England’s most powerful families, through the eyes of the eldest daughter, Mary.Although her sister, Anne, the queen; her brother, George, executed alongside Anne; and her father, Thomas, are most remembered by history, Mary was the Boleyn who set into motion the chain of events that brought about the family’s meteoric rise to power, as well as the one who managed to escape their equally remarkable fall. Sent away to France at an extraordinarily young age, Mary is quickly plunged into the dangerous world of court politics, where everything is beautiful but deceptive, and everyone she meets is watching and quietly manipulating the events and people around them. As she grows into a woman, Mary must navigate both the dangerous waters ruled by two kings and the powerful will of her own family in order to find a place for herself and the love she so deeply desires.

    288) discussion of the strange but dinkum (p. 289) pedigree (p. 224) of the naughty (p. 202), nice (p. 212), and, sometimes, obscene (p. 217) English language. We live in a torrent of words — from radio and television, books and newspapers, and now from the internet. But, as Julian Burnside reminds us in this new edition of the bestselling Wordwatching, words are a source both of pleasure and power, and can be deployed for good or for ill. Some of these essays explore curiosities in odd corners of the language simply to remind us of the extraordinary richness of the English language. Other pieces use small matters of language to illustrate larger processes of cultural borrowing and change. Burnside’s musings remind us that we should not be alarmed at the instability of the language; rather, we should see its wanton borrowings as a source of its strength and vitality. Wordwatching also reminds us of the need to be aware of the misuse of language in the service of sinister purposes — whether political, ideological, social, or personal. An ear well-tuned to the nuances of vocabulary inoculates the hearer against this epidemic of deception. With nine new essays, dealing with subjects as diverse as deadlines, fancy words, the problems with "issue," odd sounds, oxymorons, and the fallacy of "wading in," this revised and expanded edition of Wordwatching is a fascinating demonstration of the power and the pleasure of the English language.

    Harriet Harvey Wood’s original and fascinating book tells a story that few of us know. She shows that, rather than bringing culture and enlightenment to England, the Normans’ aggressive and illegal invasion destroyed a long-established and highly developed civilization, far ahead of other European societies in the sophistication of its political institutions, art and literature. Harvey Wood explores the background and lead-up to the invasion and the motives of the leading players, the state of warfare in England and Normandy in 1066, and the battle itself. Judged before the event, King Harold ought to have won the Battle of Hastings without difficulty and to have enjoyed a peaceful and enlightened reign. That he did not was largely a matter of sheer bad luck. This gripping and entertaining book shows how he came to be defeated, and what England lost as a result of his defeat and death.

    The Church cites God as the cause, and fear grips the people as they come to believe that the plague is a punishment for wickedness.But Lady Anne of Develish has her own ideas. Educated by nuns, Anne is a rarity among women, being both literate and knowledgeable. With her brutal husband absent from the manor when news of this pestilence reaches her, she looks for more sensible ways to protect her people than daily confessions of sin. She decides to bring her serfs inside the safety of the moat that surrounds her manor house, then refuses entry to anyone else, even her husband.Lady Anne makes an enemy of her daughter and her husband’s steward by doing so, but her resolve is strengthened by the support of her leading serfs...until food stocks run low. The nerves of all are tested by continued confinement and ignorance of what is happening in the world outside. The people of Develish are alive. But for how long? And what will they discover when the time comes for them to cross the moat again?Compelling and suspenseful, The Last Hours is a riveting tale of human ingenuity and endurance set against the worst pandemic in history. In Lady Anne of Develish—leader, savior, heretic—Walters has created her most memorable heroine to date.

    Other topics include humanism during the first half of the 12th century, the archpoet, the scholars' lyric, and the Carmina Burana.

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

    At the dawn of the 21st millennium the world is still experiencing these anxieties, as seen by the onslaught of fantasies of renewal, doomsday predictions, and New Age prophecies.This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Covering the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe, Cohn demonstrates how prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions, resulting in a flourishing of millenarian fantasies. The only overall study of medieval millenarian movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium offers an excellent interpretation of how, again and again, in situations of anxiety and unrest, traditional beliefs come to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.

     Stanley Lane-Poole’s acclaimed biography Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem is a complete study of the life of this noted leader: his youth, rise through twelfth-century Middle-Eastern politics, career as a military commander and the conquest of Egypt and Syria, and his intriguing clashes with Richard the Lionheart. Throughout his life, Saladin established himself as a military commander of genius, a man of honour and an intrepid statesman, cementing his place in the annals of Middle-Eastern history. The result of a lifetime of study by eminent historian Lane-Poole, Saladin and the Fall of Jerusalem benefits from the rich and colourful chronicles of Arab and Moslem historians, providing us with a unique insight into the life and deeds of this fascinating figure. “Stanley Lane-Poole has rendered valuable service in his different works by presenting various phases of Oriental history and life in such a way as to interest even those to whom such subjects are ordinarily a sealed book”.—The American Historical Review Stanley Edward Lane-Poole, 18 December 1854, was a British orientalist and archaeologist. Born in London, England, from 1874 to 1892 he worked in the British Museum, and after that in Egypt researching on Egyptian archaeology. From 1897 to 1904 he had a chair as Professor of Arabic studies at Dublin University. He died in 1931.

    Of late the old lay-sister- Mary Antony- had grown fearful lest she should make mistake in this solemn office of the counting.