The celebrated Scottish poet brings together nearly 20 years of work in this anthology— “a rare thing: a book of poems which sparkles” (Scotsman, UK). Liz Lochhead has built an impressive reputation as poet, playwright and performer attracting a large and admiring public. She gained worldwide acclaim as the Scots Makar—or Scotland’s National Poet—from 2011 to 2016, and before that served for six years as Poet Laureate of Glasgow. Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems stands as a monument to her early work. The title volume combined with four other collections—Memo for Spring (1972), Islands (1978) and Grimm Sisters (1981)—provides a complete record of her poetry from 1967 to 1984. In Dreaming Frankenstein, human relationships are explored in all their depth and complexity. Attraction, pain, acceptance, loss, triumphs and deceptions all are made immediate through her imagery, acute powers of observation, and flair as a storyteller.

For all the scholarship devoted to Mary Shelley's English novel Frankenstein, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to its role in American culture, and virtually none to its racial resonances in the United States. In Black Frankenstein, Elizabeth Young identifies and interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein monster as it appears with surprising frequency throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture, in fiction, film, essays, oratory, painting, and other media, and in works by both whites and African Americans. Black Frankenstein stories, Young argues, effect four kinds of racial critique: they humanize the slave; they explain, if not justify, black violence; they condemn the slaveowner; and they expose the instability of white power. The black Frankenstein's monster has served as a powerful metaphor for reinforcing racial hierarchy—and as an even more powerful metaphor for shaping anti-racist critique. Illuminating the power of parody and reappropriation, Black Frankenstein tells the story of a metaphor that continues to matter to literature, culture, aesthetics, and politics.

“Some of the strongest essays of recent times on Shelley’s work . . . A valuable piece of criticism.” —Byron Journal Mary Shelley is largely remembered as the author of Frankenstein, as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. This collection of essays, edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran, offers a more complete and complex picture of Mary Shelley—author of six novels, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews—emphasizing the full range and significance of her writings in terms of her own era and ours. Mary Shelley in Her Times brings fresh insight to the life and work of an often neglected and misunderstood writer who, the editors remind us, spent nearly three decades at the center of England’s literary world during the country’s profound transition between the Romantic and Victorian eras. The essays in this volume demonstrate the importance of Mary Shelley’s neglected novels, including Matilda, Valperga, The Last Man, and Falkner. Other topics include her work in various literary genres, her editing of her husband’s poetry and prose, her politics, and her trajectory as a female writer. This volume advances Mary Shelley studies to a new level of discourse and raises important issues for English Romanticism and women’s studies.

Contemporary works of art that remodel the canon not only create complex, hybrid and plural products but also alter our perceptions and understanding of their source texts. This is the dual process, referred to in this volume as “refraction”, that the essays collected here set out to discuss and analyse by focusing on the dialectic rapport between postmodernism and the canon. What is sought in many of the essays is a redefinition of postmodernist art and a re-examination of the canon in the light of contemporary epistemology. Given this dual process, this volume will be of value both to everyone interested in contemporary art—particularly fiction, drama and film—and also to readers whose aim it is to promote a better appreciation of canonical British literature.

The third revised and enlarged edition contains discussions of British, Irish and American literary works up to 2020. Focussing on outstanding writings in prose, poetry, drama and non-fiction, the book covers the time from the Anglo-Saxon period to the 21st century. The feature that makes this literary history unique among its rivals is the coverage of television/web series as a particular form of postmodern drama. The chapters on recent drama now contain detailed analyses of the development of TV and web series from Britain, Ireland and America, with extensive discussions of those series now considered classics. In addition, there are several major innovative features. To begin with, each century is introduced by a survey of the socio-political and cultural backgrounds in which the literary works are embedded. Furthermore, extensive visual material (more than 160 engravings, cartoons and paintings) has been integrated. This visual aspect as well as the introductory sections on art for each century give the reader an excellent idea of the symbiosis between visual and literary representations. Further innovative aspects include - discussions of non-fictional works from literary criticism and theory, travel writing, historiography, and the social sciences - analyses of such popular genres as crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, the Western, horror fiction, and children’s literature - footnotes explaining technical and historical terms and events - a detailed glossary of literary terms - chronological tables for British/Anglo-Irish and American literatures an updated (cut-off date 2020), extensive bibliography containing suggestions for further reading

A study of the Scottish female writer and dramatist Liz Lochhead. It examines the full range of her work and supplies a variety of contexts in which her work can be read, including feminist ideology and theatre history. It also contains a full bibliography of her work and new material.