LITERATURE 

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Harry Potter: The Books, The Films, The Cultural Phenomenon

J.R.R. Tolkien

Maurice Sendak and the Art of Children's Book Illustration

Maurice Sendak in Close-Up

Stepping Forward: Essays, Lectures and Interviews

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels

The Poetry of Landscape in Thomas Hardy

Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis

Luce Irigaray: Lips, Kissing, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Helene Cixous I Love You: The Jouissance of Writing

Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism

Andrea Dworkin

Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism

'Cosmo Woman': The World of Women's Magazines

Princess Diana in Culture, Media, Society, Feminism and the Arts

Media Hell: Explorations of Radio, Television and the Press

Sacred Gardens: The Garden in Myth, Religion & Art

Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci: Under Two Sheltering Skies

Shakespeare: Love, Poetry and Magic in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Feminism and Shakespeare

Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, Between East and West

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall: A Flood of Poems

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Critical Study

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Discovering the Goddess

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Cavafy: Anatomy of a Soul

German Romantic Poetry: Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Hölderlin, Schlegel, Schiller

Rilke: Space, Essence and Angels in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rimbaud: Arthur Rimbaud and the Magic of Poetry

Dante Studies: Dante in Love: The Vita Nuova

Petrarch, Dante and the Troubadours: The Religion of Love and Poetry

Andre Gide: Fiction and Fervour in the Novels

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity

Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys

The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys

Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys

Postmodern Powys

Sex, Death, Glitter, Gore and Lots of Money: Jackie Collins

The Passion of Colours: Travels in Mediterranean Lands

Poetic Forms: A Handbook of Stanza-forms from the History of Poetry

The Dolphin-Boy

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

J.K. ROWLING

by Jeremy Mark Robinson

A new critical study of Harry Potter, the Harry Potter cultural phenomenon, the Harry Potter books, the Harry Potter films and the Harry Potter franchise.
This new critical analysis explores the Harry Potter cultural phenomenon, the most remarkable event publishing of the past ten, twenty, thirty or more years. Since 1997, J.K. Rowling's books have sold nearly 200 million copies, selling more than Stephen King, John Grisham and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Topics studied include: the relation of Harry Potter to fantasy fiction, and to British literature and culture;   the history of children's literature and Harry Potter; Rowling's literary sources. Rowling's literary and narrative strategies;  the use of magic and witchcraft in the books; issues of gender, race, class and  psychology in Harry Potter;  analyses of each book;  the Harry Potter phenomenon in book publishin and the story of the publication of the books;  the Harry Potter films: the making of the films, the scripts, the adaption process, casting, production, critical reception; the relationship of the Harry Potter films to other contemporary Hollywood movies;  the economic and business aspects of the Harry Potter phenomenon;  the marketing of the Harry Potter franchise;  the audiences of Harry Potter products;   merchandizing, licensing, toys, etc;  J.K. Rowling as author (and celebrity).
This book is written for the general reader (and viewer) of Harry Potter.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes, illustrations   142pp  ISBN 1-861-058-5  £15.99 / $25.00

Provisional publication date: June 7, 2004
 
 

    'You never told him? Never told him what was in the letter Dumbledore left fer him? I was there! I saw Dumbledore leave it, Dursley! An' you've kept it from him all these years?'
    'Kept what from me?' said Harry eagerly.
    'STOP! I FORBID YOU!' yelled Uncle Vernon in panic.
    Aunt Petunia gave a gasp of horror.
    'Ah, go boil yer heads, both of yeh,' said Hagrid. 'Harry - yer a wizard.'
    There was silence inside the hut. Only the sea and the whistling wind could be heard.
    'I am what?' gasped Harry.
    'A wizard, o' course,' said Hagrid, sitting back down on the sofa, which groaned and sank even lower, 'an' a thumpin good'un, I'd say, once yeh've been trained up a bit. With a mum an' dad like yours, what else would yeh be?' An' I reckon it's abou' time yeh read yer letter.'

(J.K. Rowling, from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone)
 
 

by Jeremy Mark Robinson

A new cultural analysis of J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth and author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other books.
This new critical study explores Tolkien's major writings (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics, The Letters, The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth volumes), Tolkien and fairy tales, the mythological, political and religious aspects of Tolkien's Middle-earth, the critics' response to Tolkien's fiction over the decades, the Tolkien industry (merchandizing, toys, role-playing games, posters, Tolkien societies, conferences and the like), Tolkien in visual and fantasy art, the cultural aspects of The Lord of the Rings (from the 1950s to the present), Tolkien's fiction's relationship with other fantasy fiction, such as C.S. Lewis and Harry Potter, and the TV, radio and film versions of Tolkien's books, including the new Hollywood interpretations of The Lord of the Rings. The 2001-03 Hollywood films are discussed in great detail, with a scene-by-scene analysis of each film (including the extended cuts, and omissions, additions, alterations, etc).

This new book draws on contemporary cultural theory and analysis and offers a sceptical but sympathetic and illuminating account of the Tolkien phenomenon. This book is designed to appeal to the general reader (and viewer) of Tolkien: it is written in a clear, jargon-free and easily-accessible style.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 

820pp    Illustrations, bibliography, notes

ISBN 1-86171-057-7   ISBN-13 9781861710574    £30.00 / $60.00
 
 

 

To read extracts from the J.R.R. Tolkien book, click here

More Info

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MAURICE SENDAK

Maurice Sendak is the widely acclaimed American children's book author and illustrator. This critical study focusses on his famous trilogy, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside Over There, as well as the early works and Sendak's superb depictions of Grimm's fairy tales in The Juniper Tree. Poole begins with a chapter on children's book illustration, in particular the treatment of fairy tales. Sendak's work is situated within the history of children's book illustration, and he is compared with many contemporary authors.

This new, special edition includes a new introduction, a new bibliography and many more illustrations.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, illustrations    260pp
 

PAPERBACK

ISBN 1-86171-061-5    £15.00 / $30.00
 

HARDBACK

ISBN 1-86171-191-3    £50.00 / $100.00
 

by L.M. Poole

Just about the best childrenís book author and illustrator of recent times, if not the most significant, Maurice Sendak ranks alongside Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) as one of Americaís biggest talents in the world of childrenís picture books. Now heís having the Hollywood blockbuster treatment, with the release of Where the Wild Are, itís a good time to reappraise the art of this astonishingly inventive book artist.
And itís not only Maurice Sendak that Hollywood is turning to in its hunt for more childrenís fantasy literature: two huge recent movies, The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat, are based on Dr Seuss ? and thereís Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, of course (with C.S. Lewisís Narnia series on the way).
 
 

Art in Close-up Series   Bibliography, notes, illustrations   132pp  ISBN 1-86171-076-3  £19.99 / $32.00   forthcoming in 2004
 

WOLFGANG ISER

New, unpublished pieces on reader theory; Tom Jones; fictionalizing; and cultural studies, among others. Iser is a leading exponent of 'reception theory'.

Wolfgang Iser's books include The Implied Reader (1974), The Act of Reading (1978), Prospecting (1989) and The Fictive and the Imaginary (1993). He has written books on Laurence Sterne (1988) and Walter Pater (1987). He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Constance in Germany.
 
 

75pp  ISBN 1-86171-035-6    £7.99 / $12.50
 

Interview with Wolfgang Iser

 ROBERT GRAVES

Robert Graves, who died in 1985, is one of Britain's best love-poets, though he was first known as a war poet and author of Goodbye to All That and later the I, Claudius novels. This book focuses on his highly individual love-poetry, which is marked by lucidity, passion and freshness. The author relates the poetry to the central Gravesian concerns of the White Goddess; the magical landscapes; the role of the true, dedicated poet; the concept of Muse-poetry; his relations with Laura Riding; the Single Poetic Theme of the Goddess and Her consort, the dying god; and the mythological surveys, in particular The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. Throughout the book Graves is set alongside the erotic poetry traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, Sufism, courtly love, Elizabethan and Romantic poetry. His poetic oeuvre is compared with Petrarch's Rime Sparse and Shakespeare's Sonnets, as well as the English poetic tradition: Skelton, Donne, Keats, Hardy, Eliot and Yeats. The author also discusses Graves' associations with symbolism, witchcraft, mythology, folklore and psychology. All the major poems are featured in this important contribution to Graves studies. This is the only study of the whole of Graves' late love-poetry available.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  161pp  ISBN 1-871846-11-0    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

There is no now for us but always,
Nor any I but we -
Who have loved only and love only
From the hilltops to the sea
In our long turbulence of nights and days:
A calendar from which no lover strays
In proud perversity.

(Robert Graves, 'Envoi')

THOMAS HARDY

There are surprisingly few feminist analyses of Hardy, and most do not get beyond vague notions of sexism and misogynism, in the Kate Millett manner. Elvy's book, however, uses up-to-date research in the fields of cultural studies, feminist poetics, gay, lesbian and queer theory. This new, postmodern and incisive exploration of Hardy offers an exciting and radical reappraisal of the discourses of gender, desire, class, economy, socialization, identity and patriarchy in his fiction and poetry.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 

This new edition has been updated, and includes a new introduction and a new bibliography.
 

Thomas Hardy Studies     Extensive bibliography and notes  190pp  ISBN 1-86171-065-8  £15.00 / $30.00
 

"Now, my own, own love," she whispered, "you are mine, and only mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died! but I - whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee again. Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven!...but no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did good things."

(Thomas Hardy, the ending of The Woodlanders)
 

To read an extract from Sexing Hardy, click here
 

Hardy's last, great novel is lucidly analyzed employing up-to-date developments in gender, feminist and cultural studies. Sue Bridehead is reinstated as central to the novel, and to Hardy's bitter, polemical attack on the institutions of marriage, religion, education, sexuality, identity, gender and politics.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   Bibliography and notes  196pp  ISBN 1-86171-1212    £15.00 / $30.00

 

What are my books but one long plea against 'man's inhumanity to man' - to woman - and to the lower animals? Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much worse than it need be.

(Thomas Hardy, 1904)
 

A detailed and incisive analysis of Hardy's classic novel, using the latest research in feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theory, and cultural studies. Elvy offers a thorough reappraisal of Hardy's favourite heroine. She incorporates much of recent Hardy criticism, in which Hardy has been reappraised in the light of materialist, psychoanalytic, gender, poststructuralist and feminist criticism.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography and notes  240pp  ISBN 1-86171-1220    £15.00 / $30.00
 
 

"I have done it... He had come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do it anymore. I never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you... Why did you go away - why did you - when I loved you so? ...I could not bear the loss of you any longer - you don't know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I have killed him!"

(Thomas Hardy, from Tess of the d'Urbervilles)
 

For an exract from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

A new edition of Thomas Hardy's great novel, with an introduction by Margaret Elvy.

Margaret Elvy recently taught at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. She has written books on George Eliot, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. She has three books on Thomas Hardy from Crescent Moon (Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Introduction   480pp    ISBN 1-86171-1573    £15.00 / $30.00

The discourses of societal oppression, sexual repression, love, education, identity, pain and tragedy, myth and religion are Thomas Hardy's main themes. This lucid analysis of Hardy's ethics begins with the major novels and ends with an investigation of Hardy's philosophy. Not a pessimist or a 'negative' thinker, Hardy emerges as a socially committed realist, who saw that much of the pain of life is created by people, not necessarily by 'fate', time, circumstance, luck, chance or the world.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, 121pp  ISBN 1-871846-40-4    £14.99 / $23.50
 

Both Hardy and Powys created a poetic Wessex landscape. Hardy's Wessex has entered popular folklore and myth, and is used in the promotion of holidays, walks, tours, museums, hotels, even town councils. John Cowper Powys's Wessex, in A Glastonbury Romance and Weymouth Sands, among other novels, is less well-known: a place of secret corners, mossy walls, ancient earthworks, Somerset wetlands and ferny hollows. Both writers are discussed thematically for their sense of nature, mythology, philosophy, painting, sensualism, labour, folklore and the family. D.H.Lawrence is referenced throughout as a bridge between Hardy and Powys. Finally Robinson considers the film versions of Hardy's novels. This is a valuable addition to the criticism of Hardy and Powys.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series    Bibliography, notes, index and illustrations   276pp.  ISBN 1861711239   £20.00 / $40.00
 

        For extract, click here
 

Love, sexuality, gender, identity, politics, marriage and tragedy are the main discourses analyzed here, from a feminist perspective. Spenser reappraises Hardy's key texts (the five novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders and The Return of the Native) and employs the latest methodologies of feminist and cultural theory.

Tom Spenser is a poet and critic. His poetry books include Borderlands (1994) and Be-coming (1991). He has written a biography of John Keats (1986) and a collection of essays on poets such as Sappho, Catullus, Tasso and Neruda (Romantic Configurations, 1984). He lives near Abbotsbury, Dorset.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   Index, bibliography, notes. 160pp  ISBN  1-871846-07-2    £14.99 / $23.50
 

A short essay on Hardy's Wessex and his poetic vision of landscape and social múurs.
 
 

Thomas Hardy Studies Series   15pp  With Notes  ISBN 1-871846-65-X  £3.00
 

JULIA KRISTEVA

Julia Kristeva is a highly influential French philosopher and writer whose work encompasses semiotics; linguitics; women in China; modern America; the intellectual or dissident; concepts such as the power of horror; abjection; melancholy; and the chora or 'semiotic, pre-oedipal realm'; the Madonna and maternal world; and avantgarde modernists such as Artaud, Joyce, Mallarme and Beckett

Kelly Ives teaches women's studies and feminist theory at the University of California. Her books include Reading the Silences (1988), on writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Tracks (1991), on lesbianism in pop music, Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1994) and Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Crescent Moon 1996).
 
 

European Writers Series  Bibliography and notes  132pp  ISBN 1-86171-000-3    £14.99 / $23.50

 

For an extract, click here

 LUCE IRIGARAY

An exploration of the often controversial French thinker and feminist. Ives discusses Irigaray's relation with Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and other feminists. Irigaray's provocative notions include: labial lips embracing; sexual difference; the speculum; 'sexuate rights' and sexual ethics; women's language and power; angels; and female mystics.

Kelly Ives teaches women's studies and feminist theory at the University of California. Her books include Reading the Silences (1988), on writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Tracks (1991), on lesbianism in pop music, Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1994) and Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Crescent Moon 1996).
 
 

European Writers Series  Bibliography and notes  126pp  ISBN 1-86171-002-X    £14.99 / $23.50  forthcoming
 
 

Assurément la fécondité spirituelle existe. Elle a lieu parfois en deça ou au-déla de tout discours. [Certainly spiritual fecundity exists. It sometimes occurs before or beyond all discourse]

(Luce Irigaray)
 
 
 

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

Hélène Cixous is a challenging and lyrical French feminist and writer, author of the influential esay "The Laugh of the Medusa" and (with Catherine Clément) The Newly-Born Woman. Cixous is immensely productive, writing novels, plays, essays and poetic prose. Her ideas have provoked much debate in feminism: on the body, orgasmic writing, 'feminine' texts ('écriture féminine'), essentialism and the Nietzschean 'gift'.

Kelly Ives teaches women's studies and feminist theory at the University of California. Her books include Reading the Silences (1988), on writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Tracks (1991), on lesbianism in pop music, Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1994) and Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1996).
 
 

European Writers Series  Bibliography and notes  125pp  ISBN 1-86171-001-1    £14.99 / $23.50   NEW
 
 
 

To all of my amies for whom loving the moment is a necessity, saving the moment is such a difficult thing, and we never have the necessary time, the slow, sanguineous time, that is the condition of this love, the pensive, tranquil time that has the courage to let last, I dedicate the three gifts: slowness which is the essence of tenderness; a cup of passion-fruits whose flesh presents in its heart filaments comparable to the styles that poetry bears; and the spelaïon, as it is in itself a gourd full of voices, an enchanted ear, the instrument of a continuous music, an open, bottomless species of orange.

(Hélène Cixous, from To Live the Orange)

As writers, philosophers, speakers and feminists, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray are among the most provocative, subtle and illuminating voices in contemporary culture. Their concepts and methodologies continue to excite debate and contention among feminists and cultural critics. Ives discusses their major ideas, which include: jouissance and 'explosive' sexuality; women and marginality; the 'gift'; the pre-oedipal chora and semiotic realm; labial lips that embrace; social oppression; the relations between writing, language and identity; and the politics of gender, patriarchy and motherhood. Ives studies the relation of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva to other feminists, and to figures such as Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Hegel, Marx, Joyce, Derrida, Barthes, Rimbaud, Lacan and Freud.

Kelly Ives teaches women's studies and feminist theory at the University of California. Her books include Reading the Silences (1988), on writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Tracks (1991), on lesbianism in pop music, and Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1994).
 
 

This new edition has a new introduction and a new bibliography, and has been completely updated.
 

Full bibliography and notes  195pp  ISBN 1861711905    £15.00 / $30.00
 
 

 

One cannot bear to spend a Season in Paradise without crying out in instant nostalgia: never will we have the strength to endure such intoxicating agony a second time. If we had what we will never have - time to live this day over again - there are so many others desirable and each is the most beautiful one. It is superhuman torture. We do not know how, simply, to bear it. We weep for joy.

(Hélène Cixous, from The Book of Promethea)
 
 
 

by Kelly Ives

This new edition includes a new introduction and a new bibliography.
 
 

Full bibliography and notes  195pp  ISBN 1861711905    £15.00 / $30.00
 

ANDREA DWORKIN

A very powerful feminist and public speaker, Dworkin is the author of the highly influential book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, of which Mary Daly wrote: 'An original, brilliant, courageous work combining massive and precise research with incisive analysis.' Cited by many feminists, often in passing, often in a negative light, Dworkin has rarely been the subject of a full-length treatment, as here. This book sympathetically and critically surveys the chief themes of Dworkin's polemical feminism, including her anti-pornography stance; the controversial bill of rights; sexual politics; and literary æsthetics. Robinson links Dworkin to French feminism, queer, gay and lesbian theory, Anglo-American feminism, and American literature.

'It's amazing for me to see my work treated with such passion and respect.' (Andrea Dworkin)

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  ISBN 1-871846-57-9   161pp    £14.99 / $23.50
 

 

I met my beautiful boy, my lost brother, around, somewhere, and invited him in... We were like women together on that narrow piece of foam rubber, and he, astonished by the sensuality of it, ongoing, the thick sweetness of it, came so many times, like a woman: and me too: over and over: like one massive, perpetually knotted and moving creature, the same intense orgasms, no drifting separateness of the mind or fragmented fetishizing of the boy: instead a magnificent cresting, the way a wave rises to a height pushing forward and pulls back underneath itself toward drowning at the same time: one wave lasting forever, rising, pulling, drowning, dying.

(Andrea Dworkin, from Ice and Fire)
 

I am more reckless now than when I started out because I know what everything costs and it doesn't matter. I have paid a lot to write what I believe to be true. On one level, I suffer terribly from the disdain that much of my work has met. On another, deeper level, I don't give a fuck.

(Andrea Dworkin, from Letters From a War Zone)
 
 
 

A perceptive and ironic exploration of the controversial debate surrounding pornography and feminism, and how it relates to art and literature. Ives discusses the key points of the many-sided discourses of censorship, the politics of representation, violence, sexuality, æsthetics and law. She discusses pornography in film, TV, painting, theatre and literature as well as in magazines. Other topics include the new 'women's pornography'; lesbian porn; and S/M, gay and queer practices. An important contribution to feminist criticism.

Kelly Ives teaches women's studies and feminist theory at the University of California. Her books include Reading the Silences (1988), on writers such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and Virginia Woolf, Lesbian Tracks (1991), on lesbianism in pop music, Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1994) and Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism (Crescent Moon, 1996).
 
 

Bibliography, notes, illustrations 142pp  ISBN 1-871846-42-0    £14.99 / $23.50
 

Fashion, image-making, sexism, gender, identity, materialism, feminism, commodity capitalism in the 'women's magazine' market. Ranging from the monthly 'glossies' (Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue) to the 'homely' weeklies (Bella, Best and Woman's Own), through the 'style press' (Arena, GQ, i-D, The Face) to 'teenage' magazines (Jackie, Smash Hits, Mizz and Just Seventeen), this is one of the very few full-length analyses of the cultural products that sell in their millions.

Oliver Whitehorne is a freelance writer who has written extensively on the media. His previous books include TV Texts (1985), Eat the Media: Advertizing and Consumerism (1989), and Media Hell: Explorations of Radio, Television and the Press (Crescent Moon (1995).
 
 

Bibliography, illustrations, notes, 125pp  ISBN 1-86171-003-8    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

PRINCESS DIANA

This book offers an unflinching critical analysis of 'the most famous woman in the world'. Though featuring prominently in the popular press, TV, radio, magazines and so on, 'the Diana phenomenon' has been largely neglected by serious academic criticism. Topics studied include: the Princess of Wales as a Goddess-type and icon; Diana and the tabloids; Diana in women's magazines; Diana in the media; Diana, the monarchy, politics and the constitution; Diana and charity; gender, sexuality, romance and fantasy in the world of the Princess; Diana, image-making and her public persona; the Princess in the arts (in fiction, painting, pop music, etc); the media's portrayal of her personal life; the Princess in TV news and documentaries; Diana as media star and the cult of celebrity; the 'national mourning' of Diana; and how feminism has treated the Princess.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, illustrations  180pp   ISBN 1-86171-044-5   £14.99 / $23.50  forthcoming
 

An incisive analysis of the 'megavisual' hyperspace that is global media. Whitehorne's wry overview takes in juicy, hypocrisy-rich topics such as censorship in the media; consensus politics and the news; the religious dimensions of advertizing; excessive consumerism; media narratives; radio voices; soap operas; pornography; adverts in print, radio and television; tabloid and broadsheet newspapers; Cosmopolitan and 'women's magazines'; violence and bad language; 'family' viewing; British radio, including a detailed study of BBC Radio 1; the Madonna pop star phenomenon; pop promos, MTV and pop music; feminism and the media.

Oliver Whitehorne is a freelance writer who has written extensively on the media. His previous books include TV Texts (1985), Eat the Media: Advertizing and Consumerism (1989), and Media Hell: Explorations of Radio, Television and the Press (Crescent Moon (1995).
 
 

Bibliography, index, illustrations   165pp  ISBN 1-86171-068-2  £21.99 / $34.50

The garden, even the smallest and most modest of front lawns, is a miniature version of Paradise. This book relates gardens to sacred places, such as churches, temples, stone circles, mosques and mythic gardens. The nostalgic myth of a 'Golden Age', Arcadia or Paradise lies at the heart of this study of the history of gardens.
 
 

With notes and photographs  35pp  ISBN 1-871846-86-2      £7.99 / $12.50
 

 PAUL BOWLES

American ex-pat writer Paul Bowles and New Wave Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci collaborated on the 1990 film The Sheltering Sky, based on Bowles' 1949 novel. Hughes looks at Bowles' fiction, which is concerned with exile, alienation, violence and social collapse, often in a vividly portrayed North African setting. Next, Hughes analyzes Bertolucci's provocative cinema, which ranges from the New Wave and politically-conscious art movies The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris to the more 'mainstream' Hollywood epic treatments of The Last Emperor and Little Buddha.

Cassidy Hughes is a writer and photographer. His previous books include Images of India (1982), Petrarch, Dante and the Troubadours (1992) and Sex in Art (1993). His photographs have been exhibited in London, Rome, Hong Kong and New York (among others). He lives near St Just in West Penwith, Cornwall.
 
 

Filmography and bibliography, notes. 76pp  ISBN 1-871846-66-8  £8.99 / $13.50
 
 

Before her eyes was the violent blue sky - nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralysed her. Someone once said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment, the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.

(Paul Bowles, from The Sheltering Sky)
 
 

 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

A refreshing look at the cultural phenomenon that is 'Shakespeare', focussing on the discourses of sexuality, theatre, culture, tragedy, magic, politics and feminism. The Sonnets create much controversy, but Barnacle studies them as poetry first, and uses the Sonnets as a key to all of Shakespeare's texts. The book concludes with an in-depth survey of feminist literary criticism, and how it applies to the central icon of Western literature.

B.D. Barnacle taught English in Paris until 1980. He now teaches in Oxford. His books include John Donne (1978), The Victorian Novel: Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy (1984), Shakespeare (Crescent Moon, 1992) and Rilke (Crescent Moon, 1993).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  145pp  ISBN 1-871846-81-1    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds
Towards Phoebus' lodging; such a waggoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaways' eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen.

(Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, 3.1)

A survey of contemporary feminism, and its relation to literature's 'god'. The author employs up-to-date research in gay, lesbian and feminist approaches to the Renaissance world and literary texts.
 
 

With extended notes 30pp  ISBN 1-898283-01-X  £3.99 / $6.00

LAWRENCE DURRELL

A critical survey of the novelist who died in 1990. The author studies in detail all of Durrell's work; the late series of novels The Avignon Quintet, the Tunc and Nunquam novels, the travel books, the Antrobus diplomatic sketches, the letters, the poetry, and the books that made Durrell's name in the late 1950s, The Alexandria Quartet. Robinson discusses Durrell's creative friendships with Henry Miller especially, and also Anais Nin, Richard Aldington and others. The inter-related themes of love, art and death form the core of all Durrell's work. Durrell emerges as a major writer, who developed the literary modernism of Proust, Eliot and Joyce and fused it with Oriental philosophy. Still critically neglected, this study offers a much-needed new appraisal of Durrell.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of American poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  135pp  ISBN 1-86171-066-6  £15.00 / $30.00

 
For an extract from this book about Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, click here

D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell

Alexendria Revisited: Durrell, Cavafy, Keeley and Others
 
 

An expanded version of the essay that appeared in the collection of essays on Durrell's art published by UMI Research Press, Michigan. Focuses on Tunc and Nunquam (a.k.a. The Revolt of Aphrodite [1968-70]) and Durrell's exotic fusion of psychology and Gnosticism, culture and architecture, humour and insight, anecdote and poetics.
 
 

20pp  ISBN 1-871846-60-9  £3.99 / $6.00

 
These are the moments which possess the writer and live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them.

(Lawrence Durrell, from Justine)
 
 

PETER REDGROVE

A full-length journey through the erotic and magical underworld of one of Britain's best poets. Packed with quotes from Redgrove's most powerful pieces.
 

'Peter Redgrove is really an extraordinary poet' (George Szirtes, Quarto magazine)

'Peter Redgrove is one of the few significant poets now writing...His 'means' are indeed brilliant and delightful. Technically he is a poet essentially of brilliant and unexpected images...he never disappoints' (Kathleen Raine, Temenos magazine).
 
 

Bibliography, notes, index 173pp ISBN 1-871846-32-3    £14.99 / $23.50
 

A marvellous collection of poems by one of Britain's best but underrated poets, Peter Redgrove, who died in 2003. This book brings together some of Redgrove's wildest and most passionate works, creating a 'flood' of poetry. Philip Hobsbaum called Redgrove 'the great poet of our time', while Angela Carter said: 'Redgrove's language can light up a page.' Redgrove ranks alongside Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He is in every way a 'major poet'. Robinson's essay analyzes all of Redgrove's poetic work, including his use of sex magic, natural science, menstruation, psychology, myth, alchemy and feminism.

This new edition has been completey rewritten, with many new poems added.

'Robinson's enthusiasm is winning, and his perceptive readings are supported by a very useful bibliography' (Acumen magazine)

'Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall is a very rich essay... It is like a brightly-lighted box. (Peter Redgrove)

'This is an excellent selection of poetry and an extensive essay on the themes and theories of this unusual poet by Jeremy Robinson' (Chapman magazine)
 
 

PBK   ISBN 1-86171-070-4  320pp   £15.00 / $30.00

HBK   ISBN 1861711085   £50.00 / $100.00

 

The lightning zig-zags through its maze.
The thunderbird takes feathers of blue flame,
Flaps immense shadows in his mountain aviary
Of clouds, immense lightnings
Among the heaped water, the heavenly
Cisterns with their gunpowder disposition
That are in this moment sapphire,

(Peter Redgrove, from 'A Maze Like Us')
 
 

To read more of Peter Redgrove's wonderful poetry, click here
 

D.H. LAWRENCE

A new study of Lawrence's controversial last novel of transformative lovemaking, concentrating on issues such as gender, feminism, politics and censorship.

Joanna Finn-Kelcey has taught European languages at the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University. Her books include Mediaeval Representations (1991) and Dante Studies: Dante in Love, on the Vita Nuova (forthcoming).
 
 

Bibliography, notes 157pp  ISBN 1-86171-036-4    £14.99 / $23.50  forthcoming
 
 

I want, with Lady C, to make an adjustment in consciousness to the basic physical realities. I realize that one of the reasons why common people often keep - or kept - the natural glow of life, just warm life, longer than educated people, was because it was still possible for them to say fuck! or shit without either a shudder or a sensation. If a man had been able to say to you when you were young and in love: an' if tha shits, an' if tha pisses, I' glad, I shouldna want a woman who couldna shit nor piss - surely it would have been a liberation to you, and it would have helped to keep your heart warm.

(D.H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 28 December 1928)
 

On Lawrence, Eric Gill and Lady C, click here

D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell: Two Lady Chatterleys

This book explores why the fiction of D.H. Lawrence continues to fascinate critics and delight readers. With television and film adaptions being churned out (notably by Ken Russell), biographies and feminist tracts being written, and much pious chattering in the media about the Lady Chatterley trial, D.H. Lawrence's work remains as topical as ever.
 
 

With notes and bibliography. 140pp  ISBN 1-871846-36-6    £14.99 / $23.50
 

'Infinite sensual violence' is one of the phrases Lawrence employs in his two great novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love which, with Lady Chatterley's Lover, form the heart of this study of love, emotion, sexuality, gender, identity and feminism in Lawrence's work. Pace sees Lawrence as still today one of the most challenging of writers, whose provocative, angry and sometimes simplistic ideas polarize critics and feminists.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, and illustrations   166pp.  ISBN 1861711395   £15.00 / $30.00
 
 
 
 
 

I know that man cannot live by his own will alone. With his soul, he must search for the sources of the power of life. It is life we want. I know that where there is life, there is essential beauty. Genuine beauty, which fills the soul, is an indication of life, and genuine ugliness, which blasts the soul, is an indication of morbidity. - But prettiness is opposed to beauty. I know that, first and foremost, we must be sensitive to life and to its movements. If there is power, it must be sensitive power... What is alive, and open, and active, is good. All that makes for inertia, lifelessness, dreariness, is bad. This is the essence of morality. What we should live for is life and the beauty of aliveness, imagination, awareness, and contact. To be perfectly alive is to be immortal.

(D.H. Lawrence, from "Return to Bestwood")
 
 

On D.H. Lawrence's The Escaped Cock

This book analyzes the rich discourses of mythology, symbolism, form, eroticism and landscape in D.H.Lawrence's fiction. Foster traces Lawrence's symbols (tigers, suns, fish, peacocks) in many of the short stories, as well as the major novels. 'Spirit of place' was always important for Lawrence, and Foster's study investigates how Lawrence's concept of place informed his fiction, poetry and travel books.
 
 

Bibliography, notes, and illustrations   140pp.  ISBN 1861711476   £15.00 / $30.00

GEOFFREY ASHE

A personal testimony of Geoffrey Ashe's involvement in the resurgence of Goddess worship. Ashe begins with an account of his correspondence with Robert Graves during the latter's White Goddess period, and ends with the 'Goddess' classes Ashe runs at Portland, Oregon. Geoffrey Ashe has written extensively on mythological and religious subjects. His previous books include King Arthur's Avalon, Mythology of the British Isles (Methuen, 1990), The Virgin: Maryís Cult and the Re-emergence of the Goddess (Arkana, 1988) and Dawn Behind the Dawn (Henry Holt, New York, 1992)
 
 

ISBN 1-871846-33-1 35pp  £5.99 / $9.50
 

 

At Portland State University, Oregon, I give a summer course as a visiting professor, on Goddess myth and history and the implications. When I launched it in 1990 it was, to the best of my knowledge, the only course of its kind at any such institution. Possibly it still is. Looking back over the involvement that has led me to it, I realize that this has been very long and rather curious, and that it sheds light on one or two little-publicized factors in the Goddess movement. Since the movement seems to have come to stay, I think the story worth telling. I have never told it in print before.

(Geoffrey Ashe, from Discovering the Goddess)
 
 
 

SAMUEL BECKETT

Samuel Beckett's art is much debated in critical circles: this book sets out to discover why. Beckett's sense of poetry and language and its relation to creativity and culture is central to his art. All the major fiction and plays are studied, including the Unnamable trilogy, Waiting For Godot, Endgame, How It Is, the short prose pieces of the 1960s and 70s, and the late plays and texts. Other chapters discuss the collaboration with Billie Whitelaw; Beckett's æsthetics of theatre; his relation to philosophers such as Sartre and Heidegger; and his use of silence.
 
 

Bibliography, notes  121pp  ISBN 1-871846-41-2    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

The light there was then. On your back in the dark the light there was then. Sunless cloudless brightness. You slip away at break of day and climb to your hiding place on the hillside. A nook in the gorse. East beyond the sea the faint shape of high mountain. Seventy miles away according to your Longman. For the third or fourth time in your life. The first time you told them and were derided. All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest. Back home at nightfall supperless to bed. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Straining out from your nest in the gorse with your eyes across the water till they ache. You close them while you count a hundred. Then open and strain again. Again and again. Till in the end it is there. Palest blue against the pale sky. You lie in the dark and are back in that light. Fall asleep in that sunless cloudless light. Sleep till morning light.

(Samuel Beckett, from Company)

This book discusses the luminous beauty and dense, rigorous poetry of Beckett's late works, Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said and Worstward Ho. Johns looks back over Beckett's long writing career, charting the development from the Molloy-Malone Dies-Unnamable trilogy through the 'fizzles' of the 1960s to the elegiac lyricism of the Company series. Johns compares the trilogy with late plays such as Ghosts, Footfalls and Rockaby.

Gregory Johns taught English at the University of Iowa until his return to England in 1987. His articles have appeared in many leading journals. His books include critical studies of Thomas Pynchon, Raymond Carver and Paul Verlaine. He lives in Cornwall.
 
 

Bibliography, notes.   120pp  2nd edition   ISBN 1-86171-071-2      £10.00 / $20.00
 
 

C.P. CAVAFY

A study of the great modern Greek poet, the master of melancholic lyricism and erotic nostalgia. C.P. Cavafy's poetry fluidly melded the mythological and historical Hellenic world with alienated, modern day Alexandria. Cavafy's poesie was always driven by one of the most intense (yet controlled) displays of sexual desire in modern literature. This is Matt Crispin's third book on Cavafy, and offers many insights into the poet's artistic disposition. Translations of Cavafy by the author.

Matt Crispin has written three books on the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. He has also written plays. He lives in Sussex.
 
 

European Writers Series With notes and bibliography  110pp  ISBN 1-871846-22-6    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

An echo from the years of lovemaking...
A little bit from our youth's flame;
I picked an old letter
and read it again and again until dusk fell.
And melancholic I went out on the balcony -
I went out to change at least thoughts,
by watching a part of the beloved city,
a part of the busy street and shops.

(C.P. Cavafy, from 'In the Evening')
 
 
 

This critical literary study looks at the chief poets and philosophers of the Romantic era who, between them, forged a new cult of mystical, lyrical poetry. After a discussion of the key ideas of German Romanticism (infinity, eternity, nostalgia, mythology, Hellenism, extremity, sensuality), Appleby concentrates on the poets: from Goethe, 'the last Renaissance man', as he is sometimes called, to the shamanic, Neoplatonic poet Novalis and his Hymen an die Nacht.
 
 

With bibliography, notes   112pp    ISBN 1861711387   £10.00 / $20.00
 

 

Ah, to view this vast landscape from there! Oh, distance is like the future: before our souls lies an entire and dusky vastness which overwhelms our feelings as it overwhelms our eyes, and ah! we long to surrender the whole of our being, and be filled with all the joy of one single, immense, magnificent emotion.

(Wolfgang Goethe, from The Sorrows of Young Werther)
 

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Rainer Maria Rilke is probably the great 20th century poet, certainly one of the richest, most potent and lyrically beautiful of all poets. This book looks at many of Rilke's curious notions: of the 'Open', which is identified with death; of innerness or 'Kunst-Ding' in the New Poems (derived from Rilke's time with Rodin); of the Nietzschean Angel in the Duino Elegies; and of love and death in the late Sonnets to Orpheus.

B.D. Barnacle taught English in Paris until 1980. He now teaches in Oxford. His books include John Donne (1978), The Victorian Novel: Bronte, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy (1984), Shakespeare (Crescent Moon, 1992) and Rilke (Crescent Moon, 1993).
 
 

European Writers Series   Bibliography, notes  76pp  ISBN 1-871846-76-5      £7.99 / $12.50
 
 

To read some of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry, click here
To read about Rilke's life and work, click here
 

ARTHUR RIMBAUD

A new study of France's extraordinary 16 year-old genius poet, the ever-rebel who ran away from home, had a debauched, Bohemian relationship with Paul Verlaine, gave up writing poetry at 19, and ended up in Aden gun-running and slave-trading. This book looks at Rimbaud's theory of poetics; his famous 'seer letter'; his ecstatic lyrical voice; his early works; the famous 'Le Bateau ivre'; and his two amazing mythopúic statements: Illuminations and A Season in Hell.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
 
 

European Writers Series  With notes and bibliography  115pp  ISBN 1-871846-56-0    £14.99 / $23.50
 
 

Elle est retrouvée!
Quoi? líéternité.
Cíest la mer mêlée
  Au soleil.

(It is rediscovered!
- What? - Eternity.
It is the sea frayed
 With the sun.)

(Arthur Rimbaud, from A Season in Hell)
 

For more Rimbaud, click here
To read about Rimbaud's life and work

DANTE  ALIGHIERI

Dante Alighieri's early work, the Vita Nuova or 'New Life' was one of the most influential books in the history of love poetry. Finn-Kelcey discusses the links between Dante and his contemporaries, the stilnovisti; Dante and the troubadours; Dante and the courtly love tradition; the discourses of self, identity, autobiography, eroticism and gender in the Vita Nuova; and Dante's sexual politics

Joanna Finn-Kelcey has taught European languages at the University of Cambridge and Ohio State University. Her books include Mediaeval Representations (1991) and Dante Studies: Dante in Love, on the Vita Nuova (forthcoming).
 
 

European Writers Series  Bibliography, notes  160pp  ISBN 1-86171-010-0    £14.99 / $23.50  forthcoming
 
 

Tutti li miei pensier parlan d'amore,
Ed hanno in lor sì gran varietate,
Ch'altro mi fa voler sua potestate,
Altro folle ragiona il suo valore:

[All my thoughts speak of love and have in them such great diversity, that one makes me desire his power: another argues his influence madness.]

(Dante, from the Vita Nuova, XII)
 
 
 

PETRARCH AND DANTE

These two Renaissance writers tower over European culture. Here the love poetry of Francesco Petrarch (his Canzoniere) and Dante Alighieri (the Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy) is analyzed. Hughes places Dante and Petrarch in the courtly love tradition of the troubadours, Minnesangers, minstrels and stilnovisti, the creators of the great flowering of erotic poetry in the late Middle Ages.

Cassidy Hughes is a writer and photographer. His previous books include Images of India (1982), Petrarch, Dante and the Troubadours (1992) and Sex in Art (1993). His photographs have been exhibited in London, Rome, Hong Kong and New York (among others). He lives near St Just in West Penwith, Cornwall.
 
 

European Writers Series Bibliography and notes  122pp  ISBN 1-871846-71-4    £14.99 / $23.50

 
Then Beatrice looked at me, her eyes
sparkling with love and burning so divine,
my strength of sight surrendered to her power -

with eyes cast down, I was about to faint.

(Dante, from the Divina Commedia)
 
 
 

 ANDRE GIDE

André Gide (1869-1951) is the acclaimed literary giant of modern French literature. Throughout his career Gide exalted the role of the writer: as he wrote his letters and Journals he was always conscious of being a writer, of being read. This self-reflexivity and mise-en-abyme is found in the early works, Paludes, the mid-period novels, Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars, and the modernist The Counterfeiters, in which the writing of the novel becomes more interesting (to the writer) than the story itself. There are detailed chapters on the early, ecstatic work Fruits of the Earth, and the proto-Existentialist novel The Immoralist.

Jeremy Mark Robinson's books include Glorification: Religious Abstraction in Renaissance and 20th Century Art (1990), Arthur Rimbaud (1992), Lawrence Durrell (1995) and Detonation Britain: Nuclear War in the UK (1997). He edits two magazines, Passion and Pagan America (a journal of America poetry).
 
 

Bibliography, notes  110pp  ISBN 1-86171-030-5    £14.99 / $23.50  NEW
 

Nathaniel, I will teach you fervour.
Our acts are attached to us as its glimmer is to phosphorus. They consume us, it is true, but they make our splendour.
And if our souls have been of any worth, it is because they have burnt more ardently than others.
Great fields, washed in the whiteness of dawn, I have seen you; blue lakes, I have bathed in your waters - and to every caress of the laughing breeze I have smiled back an answer - this is what I shall never tire of telling you, Nathaniel. I will teach you fervour.

(André Gide, from Fruits of the Earth)

JOHN COWPER POWYS

New literary criticism by one of the leading Powys scholars. Fawkner's lucid, provocative analysis focusses on love, sex, subjectivity and affectivity in Weymouth Sands and Owen Glendower.

H.W. Fawkner's previous books include Shakespeare's Miracle Plays (1992), on Charles Dickens (1977), John Fowles (1984) and the excellent Ecstatic World of John Cowper Powys (Associated University Press, 1986). Fawkner regularly contributes to The Powys Journal, The Powys Review and Powys Notes. He is Professor of English at the University of Stockholm.
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series  Bibliography and notes  112pp  2nd ed.   ISBN 1-86171-127-1   £10.00 / $20.00
 

For an extract
 

OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST

Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys edited by Jeremy Robinson
The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys by A.P. Seabright
Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited by Jeremy Robinson
Postmodern Powys by Joe Boulter
 

An appraisal of one of England's great but unsung authors. Looks at his quartet of West Country books of the 1930s, Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands and Maiden Castle. The huge Welsh novels, Owen Glendower and Porius, are also discussed. The emphasis is on Powys' mythic life-philosophy, his visionary sense of landscape, and the links with his literary forebears: Dostoievsky, Rabelais, Homer, Shakespeare.
 
 

John Cowper Powys Series  Bibliography, notes  60pp  ISBN 1-871846-70-6  £8.99 / $13.50
 

[A Glastonbury Romance] had an electrifying effect upon me, for here speaking to me of the contemporary world (for I insist greatly upon the social exactitude of Powys's earlier novels) was a strange voice of an English Dostoevsky whose novels reproduced many of Dickens's ballets and who yet was unique.

(Angus Wilson on John Cowper Powys)
 

A study of the ecstatic fiction of John Cowper Powys, one of the wildest and strangest voices in modern literature.

'An intelligent and wide-ranging survey, which both examines the importance of the notion of ecstasy in Powys's work and relates this to an astonishing range of authors and cultural practices and beliefs.' (The Powys Society Newsletter)
 
 

John Cowper Powys Series  With bibliography and notes. 161pp  ISBN 1-86171-029-1    £14.99 / $23.50
 

This 'sinking into his soul' - his sensation which he called 'mythology' - consisted of a certain summing-up, to the surface of his mind, of a subconscious magnetic power which from those very early Weymouth days, as he watched the glitter of sun and moon upon the waters from that bow-window, had seemed prepared to answer such a summons.

(John Cowper Powys, from Wolf Solent)

A new collection of essays. H.W. Fawkner's essay "Venus" explores issues of reading, movement, love and sex, the 'amorous self', and affectivity in A Glastonbury Romance. Ian Hughes looks at the genre of Powys's novels, and how the philosophical romances were influenced by Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Janina Nordius discusses the crucial Powys theme of (transcendental) solitude in the key novel of the Powys-self alone, Wolf Solent. Joe Boulter's essay concentrates on the affinities between modernism and postmodernism, pragmatism and deconstruction, in one of Powys's late novels, The Inmates, via thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series  Bibliography and notes  110pp  2nd ed.   ISBN 1-86171-167-0   £10.00 / $20.00
 

OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity by H.W. Fawkner
The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys by A.P. Seabright
Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited by Jeremy Robinson
Postmodern Powys by Joe Boulter
 

For an extract, click here
 
 

New Essays on John Cowper Powys, including a postmodern reading of Powys via G. Wilson Knight, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard and Gianni Vattimo; Wolf Solent, parody and postmodern fiction; Jacques Derrida and deauthorization in Powys's Autobiography; and Owen Glendower and Walter Scott.

Joe Boulter is Senior Scholar at Somerville College, Oxford.
 

John Cowper Powys Studies Series  Bibliography and notes  110pp  2nd ed.   ISBN 1-86171-178-6   £10.00 / $20.00
 

OTHER TITLES OF INTEREST

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity by H.W. Fawkner
Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys edited by Jeremy Robinson
The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys by A.P. Seabright
Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited by Jeremy Robinson
 

For an extract, click here
 
 

 JACKIE COLLINS

The glitzy, glamorous blockbuster phenomenon, as found in Jackie Collins, Jeffrey Archer, Stephen King, Jilly Cooper, Judith Krantz, is given an irreverent, sceptical once-over.
 
 

Bibliography, notes  61pp ISBN 1-871846-61-7    £7.99 / $12.50
 

A journal of a Summer spent travelling around France, Italy, Greece, Spain and Morocco. Travel writing in the manner of Theroux, Chatwin, Lawrence and Fermour.
 
 

With ten photographs  80pp  ISBN 1-871846-21-8  £10.99 / $17.00
 

A guide to traditional forms of verse, such as the sonnet, ode, elegy and quatrain, as well as some lesser known poetic forms used in mediæval and Renaissance Europe, as found in Petrarch, Sceve, Tasso, Dante and the troubadours (eg the canso and dizain).
 
 

Bibliography  30pp  ISBN 1-871846-75-7  £3.99 / $6.00
 

This children's book tells the magical story of a young boy who meets a dolphin, and their adventures.
 
 

52pp  Fully illustrated by Jean Kazan  ISBN 1-871846-45-5  £3.99 / $6.00
 

Harry Potter: The Books, The FIlms, The Cultural Phenomenon

J.R.R. Tolkien

Maurice Sendak and the Art of Children's Book Illustration

Stepping Forward: Essays, Lectures and Interviews

Blinded By Her Light: The Love-Poetry of Robert Graves

Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure: A Critical Study

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Critical Study

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Love and Tragedy: A Study of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys: Wessex Revisited

Thomas Hardy: The Tragic Novels

The Poetry of Landscape in Thomas Hardy

Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis

Luce Irigaray: Lips, Kissing, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Helene Cixous I Love You: The Jouissance of Writing

Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism

Andrea Dworkin

Wild Zones: Pornography, Art and Feminism

'Cosmo Woman': The World of Women's Magazines

Princess Diana in Culture, Media, Society, Feminism and the Arts

Media Hell: Explorations of Radio, Television and the Press

Sacred Gardens: The Garden in Myth, Religion & Art

Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci: Under Two Sheltering Skies

Shakespeare: Love, Poetry and Magic in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Feminism and Shakespeare

Lawrence Durrell: Between Love and Death, Between East and West

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

Sex-Magic-Poetry-Cornwall: A Flood of Poems

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover: A Critical Study

The Passion of D.H.Lawrence

D.H. Lawrence: Infinite Sensual Violence

D.H. Lawrence: Symbolic Landscapes

Discovering the Goddess

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Cavafy: Anatomy of a Soul

German Romantic Poetry: Goethe, Novalis, Heine, Holderlin, Schlegel, Schiller

Rilke: Space, Essence and Angels in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Rimbaud: Arthur Rimbaud and the Magic of Poetry

Dante Studies: Dante in Love: The Vita Nuova

Petrarch, Dante and the Troubadours: The Religion of Love and Poetry

Andre Gide: Fiction and Fervour in the Novels

Amorous Life: John Cowper Powys and the Manifestation of Affectivity

Sensualism and Mythology: The Wessex Novels of John Cowper Powys

The Ecstasies of John Cowper Powys

Rethinking Powys: Critical Essays on John Cowper Powys

Postmodern Powys

Sex, Death, Glitter, Gore and Lots of Money: Jackie Collins

The Passion of Colours: Travels in Mediterranean Lands

Poetic Forms: A Handbook of Stanza-forms from the History of Poetry

The Dolphin-Boy

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• Alchemy Records
• Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices
• New Titles and Forthcoming Books

• You can order by telephone, post or e-mail.
• Please quote the title or ISBN of the book you want, and the quantity.
• Please write in block capitals.
• Please make cheques and monies payable to Crescent Moon (in GB pounds sterling, Eurocheques or International Money Orders). Please make US dollar cheques payable to J. Robinson.
• All titles can be ordered through your local bookseller.

BY E-MAIL: : <cresmopub@yahoo.co.uk>
 

BY MAIL: Crescent Moon Publishing, P.O. Box 393, Maidstone, Kent, ME14 5XU, U.K.
 

BY TELEPHONE:

        from the UK: 01622-729593
        from the US: 01144-1622-729593
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ON THE INTERNET:

Crescent Moon titles can be ordered via all of the main internet booksellers:
 

Amazon.com, internet bookshop <www.amazon.com>

Amazon.co.uk, internet bookshop <www.amazon.co.uk>

Play.com www.play.com

Tesco www.tesco.com

The Internet Bookshop <www.internetbookshop.co.uk>

The Book Place <www.thebookplace.com>

W.H. Smith bookshop <www.whsmith.co.uk>

Waterstone's Booksellers <www.waterstones.co.uk>

Barnes and Noble internet bookshop <barnesandnoble.com (www.bn.com)>

Borders internet bookshop <www.borders.com>

Books Online <www.bol.com>

Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk sometimes say our books are either currently unavailable or delivered within 4-6 weeks. That's their system: ignore it: our books are available from Amazon and will be delivered in 2-3 days (try using the 'new & used' section).

Alternatively, play.com, tesco.com, and waterstones.co.uk (among others) will deliver in 3-5 days.