Peter Widdowson Books

A comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context of English literature, this volume is a reliable, readable contextualized chronology of the past 500 years of literary and cultural history.

This study offers a close reading of each of Swift's novels, exploring the innovative formal strategies and identifying such recurrent themes as the presence of the past in the present, the blurring of distinctions between history' and story', fact and fiction, and the possibilities of redemption in a contemporary social and emotional wasteland.

First published in 1989, this study investigates Hardy not so much in terms of his novels but as he has been constituted as a major figure in English literature. Using Hardy as a case-study, it looks at how a ¿great writer¿ is produced in sociological terms, analysing the critical, cultural and ideological factors involved. By exposing this construction, the book seeks to release Hardy from the constraints imposed by orthodox literary history. This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century literature.

This brilliant guide provides an introductory overview of the history of 'literature' as a cultural concept, reflecting on its contemporary nature, place and function, and what the literary might mean for us today.

Retaining the valuable features of the original book, this revision provides coverage of the main literary theories and useful further readings as well as bibliographies. Remaining true to its title, this new edition adds new material on 'contemporary' literary theories, such as: cultural materialism, post-colonial theory, feminist theory, Black British, African-American, Asian, Caribbean theory, and Gay and Lesbian theory.