Scholars, amateur historians and actors have shaped theatre history in different ways at different times and in different places. This Companion offers students and general readers a series of accessible and engaging essays on the key aspects of studying and writing theatre history. The diverse inte[...]

In 1859 the popular novelist Wilkie Collins wrote of a ghostly woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments, laying her cold, thin hand on the shoulder of a young man as he walked home late one evening. His novel The Woman in White became hugely successful and popularised a style of writing tha[...]

Best known for his great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy remains one the most important nineteenth-century writers; throughout his career which spanned nearly three quarters of a century, he wrote fiction, journalistic essays and educational textbooks. The specially commissioned ess[...]

This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Robert Frost?s poetry and life. Frost remains one of the most memorable and beguiling of modern poets. Writing in the tradition of Virgil, Milton, and Wordsworth, he transformed pastoral and georgic p[...]

This Companion offers a compelling engagement with British fiction from the end of the Second World War to the present day. Since 1945, British literature has served to mirror profound social, geopolitical and environmental change. Written by a host of leading scholars, this volume explores the myri[...]

The Victorian period has a strong tradition of poetry written by women. In this Companion, leading scholars deliver accessible and cutting-edge essays that situate Victorian women's poetry in its relation to print culture, diverse identities, and aesthetic and cultural issues. The book is inclusive [...]

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry comprises original essays by eighteen distinguished scholars. It offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century, in addition to critical accounts of the representative schools, movements, regional settings, a[...]

Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an [...]

Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an [...]

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing liter[...]

This Companion focuses on the novel as a global genre with a 2,000-year history. The first section includes an examination of the various genres out of which it emerged (epic, history, romance, the picaresque) and the different ways in which fiction and realism (magical, hyper, and social) were deve[...]