NOVELISTS 

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

J.R.R. Tolkien

Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci: Under Two Sheltering Skies

Andre Gide: Fiction and Fervour in the Novels

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

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

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

Helene Cixous I Love You: The Jouissance of Writing

Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism

Andrea Dworkin

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

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

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

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Stepping Forward: Essays, Lectures and Interviews

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

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

Maurice Sendak and the Art of Children's Book Illustration

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

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

 

 
 
 

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
 

 

Chapter One
The Boy Who Lived

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense.

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

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 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
 
 

I was from early days aggrieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course, there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing, its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive.

(J.R.R. Tolkien, from a letter, 1951)
 

 

More Info

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

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
 

"You know," said Port, and his voice sounded unreal as voices are likely to do after a long pause in an utterly silent spot, "the sky here's very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it's a solid thing up there, protecting us from what's behind."
Kit shuddered slightly as she said: "From what's behind?"
"Yes."
"But what is behind?" Her voice was very small.
"Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night."
"Please don't talk about it now." There was agony in her entreaty. "Everything you say frightens me, up here. It's getting dark, and the wind is blowing, and I can't stand it."

(Paul Bowles, from The Sheltering Sky)
 
 
 

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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 American poetry).
 
 

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

 
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)
 
 
 

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ROBERT GRAVES

Robert Graves, who died in 1985, is one of Britain's greatest 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
 
 

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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 is assistant professor, Dept of English, 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

 

He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for.

(Thomas Hardy, from Jude the Obscure)
 
 

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 is assistant professor, Dept of English, 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  132pp  ISBN 1-86171-1220    £15.00 / $30.00

 
Angel, I live entirely for you... come back to me, I am desolate without you, my darling, O, so desolate! ... How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I could trust you always to love me!

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

Thomas Hardy'sTess 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
 

Spirit of Place in Hardy, Lawrence and Powys
 
 

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
 

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 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
 
 

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 (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
 

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
 

 
To me all these re-visitings of Weymouth were attended with thoughts that, as Wordsworth says of the weight of custom, were "heavy as frost, and deep, almost, as life." There were certain moments when those pebbles opposite Brunswick Terrace seemed to contain a mystery that pressed upon my brain, they and the deep greenish-grey volume of inrolling waves that were so deep just there until I felt as though they belonged to a life within life. Hard round wet pebbles and transparent depths of water - what was the secret they held; and what was it that made their conjunction just there so peculiarly significant? And the smell there used to be between the outer door of Penn House and the inner door - a smell that had sand in it, and faint, just discernible fish-scales in it, and riband-seaweed, full of sensations totally distinct from any I was feeling at this later time, always come stealing over me again?

(John Cowper Powys, writing about his beloved Weymouth, from the Autobiography)
 

H.W. Fawkner on John Cowper Powys
 
 

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

 
In one warm inrushing wave the fragrance of the whole West-country seemed to flow through him as he came forth. Sap-sweet emanations from the leafy recesses of all the Dorset woods on that side of High Stoy seemed to mingle at that moment with the rank, grassy breath of all the meadow-lands of Somerset. The iron railings in front of that row of meagre, nondescript houses opened upon the airy confluence of two vast provinces of leafiness and sunshine - to the right Melbury Bub, with its orchards and dairies; to the left Glastonbury Tor, with its pastures and fens - while the umbrageous 'auras' of these two regions, blending together in the air above the roofs of Blacksod, merged into yet a third essence, an essence sweeter than either - the very soul of the whole wide land lying between the English Channel and the Bristol Channel.

(John Cowper Powys, from Wolf Solent)
 
 
 

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

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
 

John Cowper Powys by Joe Boulter
 
 

 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
 
 

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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 avant garde 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
 
 

Since at least Hölderlin, poetic language has deserted beauty and meaning to become a laboratory where, facing philosophy, knowledge, and the transcendental ego of all signification, the impossibility of a signified or signifying identity is being sustained. If we took this venture seriously - if we could hear the burst of black laughter it hurls at all attempts to master the human situation, to master language by language - we would be forced to re-examine ëliterary historyí, to rediscover beneath rhetoric and poetics its unchanging but always different polemic with the symbolic function.
 

(Julia Kristeva, from Desire in Language)

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
 

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 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)
 
 

LAWRENCE DURRELL

by Jeremy Robinson

A new 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 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  290pp  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 recent 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

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

 
My soul softly flaps in the little Pentecostal flame with you, like the peace of fucking. We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being, between the sun and the earth.

(D.H. Lawrence, from Lady Chatterley's Lover)
 

Eric Gill and D.H. Lawrence
 
 

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
 

...the novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships. The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can.

(D.H. Lawrence)
 

Living is not simply not-dying. It is the only real thing, it is the aim and end of all life.

(D.H. Lawrence, from A Study of Thomas Hardy)
 
 
 

'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
 
 
 

 
 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

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
 

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.
 

A new edition, including a new introduction and a new bibliography.
BibliograBibliography, notes.   120pp  2nd edition   ISBN 1-86171-071-2      £10.00 / $20.00
 
 

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
 
 

 PETER REDGROVE

A full-length critical journey through the erotic and magical underworld of one of Britain's best writers. 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  £15.00 / $30.00
 

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
 

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)
 
 
 

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

J.R.R. Tolkien

Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci: Under Two Sheltering Skies

Andre Gide: Fiction and Fervour in the Novels

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

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

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

Helene Cixous I Love You: The Jouissance of Writing

Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism

Andrea Dworkin

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

Love, Culture and Poetry: A Study of Lawrence Durrell

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

Samuel Beckett Goes Into the Silence

In the Dim Void: Samuel Beckett's Late Trilogy

Stepping Forward: Essays, Lectures and Interviews

Peter Redgrove: Here Comes the Flood

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

Maurice Sendak and the Art of Children's Book Illustration

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

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

• Harry Potter
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• Index of Titles, ISBNs, Dates and Prices
• New Titles and Forthcoming Books

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