A personal friend of T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Christopher Fry, and C.S. Lewis, to mention only a few, Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) was a self-educated, somewhat scholarly, rather ugly-faced Londoner with a Cockney accent. As a married man with the usual economic difficulties that disturb family life, he was forced to supplement his income as an editor for Oxford University Press by lecturing, tutoring, and writing. In a comparatively short life time he produced more than fifty works, several published posthumously, plus a considerable number of articles, book reviews, and verses for British and Irish periodicals. The annotated bibliography at the end of this study gives a general indication of the scope and value of this literary output. Since the death of Charles Williams, something like a cult has grown up about his name, not only in Anglican literary circles in England but also in various university and church circles in America. The reasons for this are not always obvious, but one fact appears to be certain: the cult is usually concerned with Williams, the philosopher, or Williams, the theologian, or Williams, the novelist. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis, for example, have discussed briefly one or all three of these facets of Williams' literary personality, and the latter two have acknowledged a certain literary indebtedness to him. As yet, however, few members of the cult recognize Williams as a dramatist, poet, literary critic and theorist, historian and biographer, and editor. Moreover, with the exception of C.S. Lewis, no member of the cult has attempted a scholarly investigation of any aspect of Williams' thought. The present study is a critical exploration of one of these avenues of thought: Williams' concept of the nature of poetry. The conclusion of this study indicates that the members of the cult should seriously consider him as a literary critic and theorist. At a time when modern criticism still exhibits the confusion inherited from its romantic background, it is no mean achievement for Williams to separate the art of poetry from the other intellectual disciplines and to claim that "poetry is a thing sui generis.--p. vii.

About half the essays consider Williams's fiction. They explore the theological roots of his theory of imagery; the rhetorical implications of his belief that language is inherently meaningful; his methods of creating "subjective correlatives" for heightened states of consciousness; and, in individual works of fiction, his revisionary use of time-travel and ghost-story conventions, his rhetorical application of Blakean "contraries," aspects of his diction and syntax, and his call to pursue integrity of speech as an ideal.

Academic attention to science fiction and fantasy began in 1958, when the Modern Language Association scheduled its first seminar on science fiction at its New York meeting. Over the years science fiction emerged as a popular subject that achieved critical attention and acceptance as an academic discipline. A Research Guide to Science Fiction Studies, originally published in 1977, is designed to provide the reader – whether they be scholar, teacher, librarian, or fan – with a comprehensive listing of the important research tools that have been published in the United States and England through 1976. The volume contains over 400 selected, annotated entries covering both general and specialized sources, including general surveys, histories, genre studies, author studies, bibliographies, and indices, which span the entire range of science fiction and fantasy scholarship.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 4 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.