Search results for ""author david womersley""

This new anthology provides seventeen key plays by twelve dramatists of the Restoration period in an anthology designed specifically for course use, with annotations and judiciously modernized texts. It offers a representative sampling of the types of play of the period, including plays by both men and women - sex comedy, moral comedy, heroic drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history.

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he essays collected in this volume explore the Whiggish literary culture that arose in England in the late seventeenth century and continued throughout the following century. From the pre-history of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the pressures created by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described. As both how literature was made expressive of Whiggish attitudes, and how Whiggism itself proved a spur to literary innovation, become steadily more clear, so the outlines of nothing less than a new literary history of the eighteenth century comes into view.

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This new anthology provides seventeen key plays by twelve dramatists of the Restoration period in an anthology designed specifically for course use, with annotations and judiciously modernized texts. It offers a representative sampling of the types of play of the period, including plays by both men and women - sex comedy, moral comedy, heroic drama, Shakespearean adaptation and political history.

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This definitive Companion provides a critical overview of literary culture in the period from John Milton to William Blake. Its broad chronological range responds to recent reshapings of the canon and identifies new directions of study. The Companion is composed of over fifty contributions from leading scholars in the field, its essays offer students a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field from a wide range of perspectives. It also, however, gives researchers and faculty the opportunity to update their acquaintance with new critical and scholarly work. The volume meets the needs of an intellectual world increasingly given over to inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary study by covering philosophical, political, cultural and historical writing, as well as literary writing. Unlike other similar volumes, the main body of the Companion consists of readings of individual texts, both those commonly and less commonly studied.

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David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of Literature at the University of Oxford. Among his interests are Jonathan Swift (he was the general editor of the CUP edition of Swift), Daniel Defoe and Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he edited for Penguin Classics.

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This volume contains a generous selection from the essays Johnson published twice weekly as 'The Rambler' in the early 1750s. It was here that he first created the literary character and forged the distinctive prose style that established him as a public figure. Also included here is the best of Johnson's later journalism, including essays from the periodicals 'The Adventurer' and 'The Idler'.

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Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire compresses thirteen turbulent centuries into an epic narrative shot through with insight, irony and incisive character analysis. Sceptical about Christianity, sympathetic to the barbarian invaders and the Byzantine Empire, constantly aware of how political leaders often achieve the exact opposite of what they intend, Gibbon was both alert to the broad pattern of events and significant revealing details.

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Spanning thirteen centuries from the age of Trajan to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, DECLINE & FALL is one of the greatest narratives in European Literature. David Womersley's masterly selection and bridging commentary enables the readerto acquire a general sense of the progress and argument of the whole work and displays the full variety of Gibbon's achievement.

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Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilizations over thirteen centuries - its rulers, wars and society, and the events that led to its disastrous collapse. Here, in volumes one and two, Gibbon charts the vast extent and constitution of the Empire from the reign of Augustus to 395 ad. And in a controversial critique, he examines the early Church, with fascinating accounts of the first Christian and last pagan emperors, Constantine and Julian.

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Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilizations over thirteen centuries - its rulers, wars and society, and the events that led to its disastrous collapse. Here, in volumes three and four, Gibbon vividly recounts the waves of barbarian invaders under commanders such as Alaric and Attila, who overran and eventually destroyed the West. He then turns his gaze to events in the East, where even the achievements of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the campaigns of the brilliant military leader Belisarius could not conceal the fundamental weaknesses of their empire.

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In the wake of the formalist 'New Critical' consensus of the mid-twentieth century, a central and recurrent problem in the field of literary study has been that of precisely how the literary text was to be related to the various and proliferating contexts that now jostled for critical attention. The quality of balanced judgment was suddenly especially valuable. These essays range over the fields of Erskine-Hill's own scholarship, from Shakespeare and early modern literature to Wordsworth, evincing in their own procedures and discriminations the influence of his own example: scrupulous care over the handling of evidence, an interdisciplinary impulse yoked always to a prizing of the literary (particularly of the poetic), a willingness to embrace an ambitious argument where it can be supported, a humaneness of temper, particularly in polemic. Latent within them all is a wrestling with that central problem of text and context that preoccupied Erskine-Hill throughout his career, and which is still the dominant issue in literary studies.

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The two plays presented in full in this volume – Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World – illustrate the evolution of Restoration comedy between 1675 and 1700. Includes full texts of Wycherley's The Country Wife and Congreve's The Way of the World. Demonstrates how Restoration comedy evolved between 1675 and 1700. Introduces general readers or students to the genre. An editorial introduction guides readers through the plays and the period.

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