ABSTRACT

This introductory book takes the reader through literary history from the Renaissance to Postmodernism, and considers individual texts as paradigms which can both reflect and unsettle their broader linguistic and cultural contexts. Richard Bradford provides detailed readings of individual texts which emphasize their relation to literary history and broader socio-cultural contexts, and which take into account developments in structuralism and postmodernism. Texts include poems by Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Hopkins, Browning, Pound, Eliot, Carlos Williams, Auden, Larkin and Geoffrey Hill.

chapter 1|30 pages

Theory

chapter 2|35 pages

Shakespeare and the metaphysicals

chapter 3|31 pages

The Restoration and the eighteenth century

chapter 4|37 pages

Romanticism

chapter 5|21 pages

Victorian poetry

chapter 6|46 pages

Modernism and criticism