Oxford History of English Literature

Series · 15

books · 1944-1997

By J.I.M. Stewart, E.K. Chambers, William Lindsay Renwick, and more

Books in series

Middle English Literature, 1100-1400

1986

Oxford University Press is pleased to announce the complete reissue of all the existing volumes of the Oxford History of English Literature. The set, originally published in thirteen volumes, is soon to be expanded to fifteen volumes with the forthcoming 1990 and 1991 publications of volumes VI, Shakespeare, and Volume XVI, Victorian Novel. Readers can now collect any of the thirteen volumes they missed upon the first publication, while newcomers can obtain the fifteen-volume set all at once. Handsomely presented in matching jackets, some of the books have been retitled for the purpose of the reissue, while the set as a whole has been renumbered for ease of use.

Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Verse and Prose

1947

Aims to study the age of Chaucer and the events that shaped his career, and to show how the age made the poet. It also pays considerable attention to the precise poetic means Chaucer used to produce his effects. The writings of Lydgate, Hoccleve, Pecock, Fortescue, Caxton and other unknown writers of the 15th century are also assessed. Their work covered subjects such as love, war, religion, history, medicine, travel and practical affairs. This book sums up the contribution of the 15th century to the body and continuity of English literature.

English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages

1945

This book is that the story of the medieval drama and the story of the ballad are better told without strict attention to the boundaries of time. While the contents are more miscellaneous than elsewhere in the series, he has been able to give to the book the not inappropriate title, The close of the Milddle ages.

The English Drama 1485-1585

1969

Part of the complete reissue of "The Oxford History of English Literature", this volume concentrates on 100 years of drama during the 15th and 16th centuries. It looks at morality plays, masques and pageants, sacred drama, comedy and tragedy.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century

1944

Provides a comprehensive criticism of literature from late medieval Scottish poetry to the prose and poetry of the early Renaissance. Bibliogs

English Drama 1586-1642

The Age of Shakespeare (Oxford History of English Literature)

1997

Shakespeare is usually set apart from his contemporaries, in kind no less than quality. This book, the long-awaited final volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, sees Elizabethan drama as drawn together by a shared need to deal with contradictory pressures from heterogeneous audiences, censorious authorities, profit driven managers, and authors looking for classic status and social esteem. Hunter follows the compromises and contradictions of the Elizabethan repertory, examining how Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were able to move easily from vulgar realism to poetic transcendence.

English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660

1973

English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (Oxford History of English Literature) [Mar 27, 1975] Bush, Douglas

Restoration Literature 1660-1700

Dryden, Bunyan, and Pepys

1969

This volume deals with what is often called the age of Dryden. Dryden, as the greatest poet and critic of the Restoration period and one of its leading dramatists, has been given fuller treatment here than any other writer. But this was also the age of Bunyan, of Halifax and Locke, of Boyle and Newton. And the period is unusually rich in writers just short of the highest rank—the dramatists Etherege, Shadwell, Wycherley, Otway, Lee, and Congreve; the preachers Barrow, South, and Tillotson; the historians Clarendon and Burnet; Samuel Butler, Charles Cotton and Rochester among the poets; and miscellaneous writers like Evelyn and Pepys, Aubrey, Cowley and Sir William Temple. The three longest chapters—two on drama and one on religion—will show where the main emphasis of this curiously divided period really fell; but due weight is given to the historians and biographers, the essayists and journalists, the men of science, the poets, the politicians, the writers of fiction, and lastly—in this critical and controversial age—the critics.

The Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740

Swift, Defoe, and Pope

1959

Part of the complete reissue of "The Oxford History of English Literature", this volume covers the poetry, prose, drama, philosophy, criticism, history, memoirs and travel literature of the early 18th century.

#10

The Age of Johnson 1740 - 1789

1979

Hardcover in very good condition. Reprinted in 1980. Edited and completed by Geoffrey Carnall. The jacket is sunned on the spine, not affecting text. Light foxing on the page block. Pages are clean; text is clear. The Oxford History of English Literature, volume eight. CM

#11

The Rise of the Romantics, 1789-1815

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Jane Austen (Oxford History of English Literature

1963

Part of the complete reissue of The Oxford History of English Literature, this volume concentrates on the Romantic movement, but does not strictly adhere to the period 1789 to 1815. It includes authors whose most characteristic work was published during this period though their roots were in the past, and also people such as Wordsworth and Coleridge who made their names long before 1815.

#12

Oxford History of English Literature

1963

#13

The Victorian Novel

1991

This volume covers the great novelists of the high Victorian age, from the death of Scott in 1832 to the death of George Eliot in 1880. In this period, as the political unease of the first two decades of the century gave way to stability, the novel came into its own. Providing an overview of both the major and minor novelists, The Victorian Novel devotes separate chapters to Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Trollope, and Meredith and sets the writers and their works against the social and historical background that produced them. A chronological table shows the other literary works and events of this popular time in English writing."

#14

Victorian Poetry, Drama, and Miscellaneous Prose 1832-1890 (Oxford History of English Literature)

1990

This book is intended for students of English literature at A' level and above; general readers interested in a complete history of literature from Middle English to the earlier twentieth century.

#15

Eight Modern Writers

1963

This book is intended for students of English literature at A-level and above; general readers interested in a complete history of literature from Middle English to the earlier twentieth century.

Authors

J.I.M. Stewart

Author · 4 books

Full name: John Innes MacKintosh Stewart Published mysteries under the pen name of Michael Innes. Stewart was the son of Elizabeth Jane (née Clark) and John Stewart of Nairn. His father was a lawyer and director of Education in the city of Edinburgh. Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy, where Robert Louis Stevenson had been a pupil for a short time, and later studied English literature at Oriel College, Oxford. In 1929 he went to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. He was lecturer in English at the University of Leeds from 1930 to 1935, and then became Jury Professor of English in the University of Adelaide, South Australia. He returned to the United Kingdom to become Lecturer in English at the Queen's University of Belfast from 1946 to 1948. In 1949 he became a Student of Christ Church, Oxford. By the time of his retirement in 1973, he was a professor of the university. Using the pseudonym Michael Innes, he wrote about forty crime novels between 1936 and 1986. Innes' detective novels are playfully highbrow, rich in allusions to English literature and to Renaissance art. Sinuous, flexible and effortlessly elegant, Stewart's prose is refreshingly free of all influence by Strunk & White. The somewhat ponderous writing style and analysis of character, particularly in the early novels, is frequently Henry Jamesian. The best-known of Innes' detective creations is Sir John Appleby (originally Inspector John Appleby) of Scotland Yard, who is a feature of multiple books. Other novels also feature the amateur but nonetheless effective sleuth, painter and Royal Academician, Charles Honeybath. The two detectives meet in "Appleby and Honeybath." Some of the later stories feature Appleby's son Bobby as sleuth. Stewart also wrote studies of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and Thomas Hardy. His last publication was his autobiography Myself and Michael Innes (1987). In 2007, his estate transferred all of Stewart's copyrights and other legal rights to Owatonna Media.

E.K. Chambers

Author · 1 books

Sir Edmund Kerchever Chambers, KBE, CB, FBA, usually cited as E. K. Chambers, was an English literary critic and Shakespearean scholar.

William Lindsay Renwick

Author · 1 books

William Lindsay Renwick (1889-1970) was Professor of English Literature at the University of Durham from 1921 to 1945 and Regis Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University from 1945-1959.

Frank Percy Wilson

Author · 1 books

Frank Percy Wilson FBA was a British literary scholar and bibliographer. Author of many works on Elizabethan drama and general editor of the Oxford History of English Literature, Wilson was Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford from 1947 to 1957.

Jack A.W. Bennett

Henry Stanley Bennett

Author · 3 books

C.S. Lewis

Author · 163 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures. Lewis was married to poet Joy Davidman. W.H. Lewis was his elder brother]

James Runcieman Sutherland

Author · 1 books

James Runcieman Sutherland, English scholar and teacher: Senior Lecturer, University College London 1930-36; Professor of English Literature, Birkbeck College 1936-44; Editor, Review of English Studies 1940-47; Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen Mary College 1944-51; Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature, University College London 1951-67 (Emeritus); FBA 1953; Public Orator, London University 1957-62; Knighted 1992. He will be remembered also by many thousands of people who have little academic interest in literature but who enjoy and keep returning to The Oxford Book of English Talk (1953) and The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975) which he compiled. Some other works include Defoe (1937), A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948), Alexander Lectures in Toronto (On English Prose, 1957) and the Clark Lectures in Cambridge (English Satire, 1958), English Literature of the Later Seventeenth Century (1969), Daniel Defoe: a critical study (1971), The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (1986), and an attribution study on Swift (1992).

Ian Jack

Author · 21 books

Ian Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.

John Everett Butt

Author · 1 books

Born in 1906, John Everett Butt was educated at Shrewsbury School, and Merton College, Oxford. He became a Lecturer in English at Leeds University in 1929, and in 1930 he was Assistant Librarian at the English School Library, Oxford. From 1930 to 1946 he was a Lecturer in English at Bedford College, University of London, and during the Second World War he held administrative posts at the Ministry of Home Security and the Home Office. In 1952, he was a visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Between 1946 and 1959, Butt was Professor of English Language and Literature at King's College (University of Durham) at Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was appointed Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh in 1959.