Books
Literary Criticism and Poetry Books
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Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger
In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger - the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor - carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are different has become strong. This title reveals the history of encounters with alien figures and our struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown. Read more...
The Covert Sphere: secrecy, fiction and the national security state
Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. Read more...
Teach us of Love
Henry Disney's eighth collection of poems, in memory of his wife Audrey, continues to reflect his 'unsentimental Christian faith, and the rigorous scientific thinking of a very honest man'. Sold in aid of Spinal Research. Read more...
The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy
Tragedy is the art-form created to confront the most difficult experiences we face: death, loss, injustice, thwarted passion, despair - from ancient Greek theatre to the most recent plays. But it is also a word we encounter in the media, denoting an event of devastating emotional power. This introduction explores the relationship between tragic experience and tragic representation. Read more...
Perfidy and Passion: Reintroducing the Iliad
A new interpretation of Homer’s Iliad revealing that the secrets Homer’s characters cling to are as important as what they tell. Read more...
Exposure: Forty Poems by Jonathan Steffen
Discover this haunting, 88-page coffee-table book of modern love poetry by Jonathan Steffen – each poem illustrated by the work of an outstanding contemporary photographer. Read more...
The Old Ways: a journey on foot
Lets readers follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove - roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. Read more...
The Farewell Glacier
Poems inspired by a journey to the High Arctic, calling up voices from across the Arctic past - explorers, whalers, mapmakers, scientists, financiers, the famous and the forgotten - as well as attempting to give voice to the confronting mysteries of the Arctic. Read more...
Mountains of the Mind: a history of a fascination
Why do so many feel compelled to risk their lives climbing mountains? During the climbing season, one person a day dies in the Alps, and more people die climbing in this season in Scotland than they do on the roads. Read more...
We Look Like This
We Look Like This anatomizes how history, violence, power, lust and mortality work on us. Read more...
Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer
This book brings together a selection of prose works from the legendary poetry circular The English Intelligencer (1966–68), one of the definitive documents of later twentieth-century British poetry. Read more...
The Wild Places
The Wild Places explores our ideas of the wild. This book also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance. Read more...
A Sense of Shock
What did modern British and Irish literature have to do with French impressionist painting? Read more...
Grace
Nominated for the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. What happens if, when the angel arrives with his message, no one's at home? Read more...
Reading the Ruins
From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. Read more...
Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition
Raphael Lyne addresses a crucial Shakespearean question: why do characters in the grip of emotional crises deliver such extraordinarily beautiful and ambitious speeches? Read more...
Shakespeare on Love
Dr Ronald Gray, Fellow of Emmanuel College, lectured at Cambridge University on German Literature and Philosophy for 33 years, and now expands his article, “Will in the Universe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Plato’s Symposium, Alchemy and Renaissance Neo-Platonism,” published in Shakespeare Survey 59 (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Read more...
Plutarch: How to Study Poetry (De audiendis poetis)
Plutarch's essay 'How to Study Poetry' offers a set of reading practices intended to remove the potential damage that poetry can do to the moral health of young readers. Read more...
The Love of a Woman
This new collection of poetry The Love of a Woman has been described as a book about hopefulness and the avoidability of decadence. Read more...
The Mays XIX
Each year, the Mays publishes a selection of the best and most exciting new writing from students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, ever since it first appeared in 1993. Read more...
Irish Essays
Denis Donoghue has been a key figure in Irish studies and an important public intellectual in Ireland, the UK and US throughout his career. Read more...
Sparrow Tree
Gwyneth Lewis’s highly inventive Sparrow Tree puts nature writing in a spin, presenting a huge variety of birds, both British and American: blue tits, blackbirds, egrets, juncos, starlings, herons and hummingbirds as well as the sparrows of the title. Read more...
Gemini Four
Art Groups usually last less than a couple of years then fall out. Gemini Poets are publishing their fourth collection of poetry, nearly 40 years after the first one. Read more...
Reiteration
'Henry Disney's is, to borrow a phrase, a beautiful mind, and also a tough mind.' So wrote Kitty Ferguson in her review of his sixth collection. Read more...
Elegguas
Kamau Brathwaite is a major Caribbean poet of his generation and one of the major world poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Read more...
The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis
A distinguished academic, influential Christian apologist, and best-selling author of children's literature, C. S. Lewis is a controversial and enigmatic figure who continues to fascinate, fifty years after his death. Read more...
Coleridge's Play of Mind
Eminent Coleridgean scholar John Beer presents a series of biographical investigations exploring Coleridge's life, stage by stage, and reconsidering the intellectual quality of his thinking and poetry through an emphasis on the notion of 'play'. Read more...
The Mays 18 - 2010
The Best New Writing, Art and Photography from Oxford and Cambridge. Read more...
Collected Poems and Translations
This collection of poetry and translations draws together the threads of his work in eight linked sections of sensuous evocation. Read more...
F.R. Leavis ‘Critical Thinkers
F.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. Read more...
