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From 1948 to 1951, Britain's foremost 20th-century photographer, Bill Brandt, journeyed into the heart of literary Britain, capturing these brilliant photographs.
Breaking new ground in the study of British literary culture during an important, transitional period, this new work by Mary Ann Gillies focuses on the professional literary agent whose emergence in Britain around 1880 coincided with, and accelerated, the transformation of both publishing and authorship. Like other recent studies in book and print culture, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 starts from the central premise that the business of authorship is inextricably linked with the aesthetics of literary praxis. Rather than provide a broad overview of the period, however, Gillies focuses on a specific figure, the professional literary agent. She then traces the influence of two prominent agents - A. P. Watt (generally acknowledged as the first professional literary agent) and J. B. Pinker (the leading figure in the second wave of agents) - focusing on their respective relationships with two key clients. The case studies not only provide insight into the business dynamics of the literary world at this time, but also illustrate the shifting definition of literature itself during the period.
What caused Dickens to leap out of bed one night and walk 30 miles from London to Kent? How did a small town on the Welsh borders become the second-hand bookshop capital of the world? Why did a jellyfish persuade Evelyn Waugh to abandon his suicide attempt in North Wales? A multitude of curious questions are answered in Britain by the Book, a fascinating travelogue with a literary theme, taking in unusual writers' haunts and the surprising places that inspired some of our favourite fictional locations. We'll learn why Thomas Hardy was buried twice, how a librarian in Manchester invented the thesaurus as a means of coping with depression, and why Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 during the Second World War. The map of Britain that emerges is one dotted with interesting literary stories and bookish curiosities.
Literary Historicity explores how eighteenth-century British writers considered the past as an aspect of experience. Mack moves between close examinations of literature, historiography, and recent philosophical writing on history, offering a new view of eighteenth-century philosophies of history in Britain. Such philosophies, she argues, could be important literarily without being focused, as has been assumed, on questions of fact and fiction. Eighteenth-century writers—like many twentieth-century philosophers—often used literary form not in order to exhibit a work's fictional status but in order to consider what the relation between the past and present might be. Literary Historicity portrays a British Enlightenment that both embraces the possibility of historical experience and interrogates the terms for such experience, one deeply engaged with historical consciousness not as an inevitability of the modern world, but as something to be understood within it.
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo." But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Much of the writing from 1819, argues James Chandler, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place as history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.
As a traditional site of historical criticism, medieval studies is particularly well placed to benefit from the recent reemergence of historicism in literary studies. But this new "critical historicism" differes from the traditional criticism in both method an interests, differences that are well illustrated by this collection. A concern with politics, a reliance on the materials of economic and social history, a conception of writing as a form of social practices, a focus upon the forces of change in medieval culture, and unwillingness to observe the usual distinction between literary and historical texts, and a historicization of their own activity--these characteristics make these essays a significant contribution to medieval studies. Moreover, both in conception and execution the essays reject the barrier that the humanist account of history has erected between a Middle Ages stigmatized as distant and other and a Renaissance consecrated as the beginning of the modern world. Thus they invite the attention of nonmedievalists, especially Renaissance specialists, who wish to test their assumptions about medieval literature against some of the best recent work in the field. The authors consider a wide range of materials. Three of the essays explore Chaucer's career as a bureaucrat, a diplomat, and a poet. Other topics include Langland's self-constitution in Piers Plowman, the medieval production and modern reception of the mystery plays, Hoccleve's innovative strategies for offering political advice to his king, and the ideological and psychological interests that governed the idea of the city in sixteenth-century Scotland. All scholars and studies of the Middle Ages, comparative literature, and literature and language programs generally will appreciate this ground-breaking collection. Contributors:Anne MiddletonPaul StrohmLee PattersonDavid WallaceLarry ScanlonTheresa ColettiLouise Fradenburg This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.
Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upward’s fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upward’s work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upward’s central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.
First published in 1959. The scope of this four volume work makes it valuable as a work of reference, connecting one period with another an placing each author clearly in the setting of his time. This is the fourth volume and includes the Nineteeth Century and after (1789-1939).