Select guidance on extreme cuisine,gutter beverages,tawdry travel, seedy films, dissolute sex and corrupt individuals. Featuring contributions from the 19th century's anti-heroes - Oscar Wilde,Octave Mirbeau and J.K.Huysmans and the wayward spirits of our age- Hari Kunzru, Nicholas Royle, Louise Welsh, Helen Walsh, Belle de Jour

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

The Victorian Literature Handbook is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to literature and culture in the Victorian period. It is a one-stop resource for literature students, providing the essential information and guidance needed from introducing the historical and cultural context to key authors, texts and genres. It includes case studies for reading literary and critical texts, a guide to key critical concepts, introductions to key critical approaches, and a timeline of literary and cultural events. Essays on changes in the canon, interdisciplinary research and current and future directions in the field lead into more advanced topics and guided further reading enables further independent work. Written in clear language by leading academics, it is an indispensable starting point for anyone beginning their study of nineteenth century literature.

While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. In The Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation. The Decadent Republic of Letters looks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated, The Decadent Republic of Letters unearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.

The Handbook ranges widely and in depth across 20th-century war poetry, incorporating detailed discussions of some of the key poets of the period. It is an essential resource for scholars of particular poets and for those interested in wider debates. Contributors include some of the most important international poetry critics of our time.

The twenty-eight essays in this handbook represent the best current thinking in the study of Latin language and literature in the Middle Ages. Contributing authors--both senior scholars and gifted younger thinkers among them--not only illuminate the field as traditionally defined but also offer fresh insights into broader questions of literary history, cultural interaction, world literature, and language in history and society. Their studies vividly illustrate the field's complexities on a wide range of topics, including canonicity, literary styles and genres, and the materiality of manuscript culture. At the same time, they suggest future possibilities for the necessarily provisional and open-ended work essential to the pursuit of medieval Latin studies. The overall approach of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Latin Literature makes this volume an essential resource for students of the ancient world interested in the prolonged after-life of the classical period's cultural complexes, for medieval historians, for scholars of other medieval literary traditions, and for all those interested in delving more deeply into the fascinating more-than-millennium-long passage between the ancient Mediterranean world and what we consider modernity.