Professor Woudhuysen masterfully bridges the study of Renaissance English literature with the history of the book. His scholarship illuminates the intricate relationship between the material forms texts take and their meanings, exploring aspects from manuscript collation to the evolution of punctuation in works from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf. He has a deep engagement with editing Renaissance drama and with digital humanities projects that make historical literary sources widely accessible. His keen interest in bibliography and paleography informs his significant contributions to reference works and his insightful lectures on the history of copying and facsimiles.
The era between the accession of Henry VIII and the crisis of the English republic in 1659 formed one of the most fertile epochs in world literature. This anthology offers a selection of its poetry, and includes a range of works by the poets of the age - notably Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Sepnser, John Donne, William Shakespeare and John Milton.
First published in 1888, Plain Tales from the Hills was Kipling's first volume of prose fiction. Most of the stories it includes had already appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette they were written before he reached the age of 22; and they show a remarkably precocious literary talent. His vignettes of life in Brittish India a hundred years ago give vivid insight into Anglo-India at work and play, into a barrack-room life, and into the character of Indians themselves.