The Short Oxford History of English Literature provides a comprehensive and authoritative introductory guide to the literature of the British Isles from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day, including a full treatment of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh writing in English. The chapters are arranged chronologically, covering all major periods of English literature from Old English to the post-war era, including the medieval period, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Romanticism, the Victorians, Modernism, and Postmodernism. In addition to a detailed discussion of all major figures and their works, Andrew Sanders examines throughout the relationship between the literary landscape and wider contemporary social, political, and intellectual developments. This edition contains a range of new entries on important contemporary authors and an increased focus on female writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as well as a fully updated and revised bibliography.

Gothic as a form of fiction-making has played a major role in Western culture since the late eighteenth century. In this volume, fourteen world-class experts on the Gothic provide thorough and revealing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying type of fiction from the 1760s (the decade of The Castle of Otranto, the first so-called 'Gothic story') to the end of the twentieth century (an era haunted by filmed and computerized Gothic simulations). Along the way, these essays explore the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions, the realistic novel, the theatre, Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations, the rise of film and other visual technologies, the struggles between 'high' and 'popular' culture, changing psychological attitudes towards human identity, gender and sexuality, and the obscure lines between life and death, sanity and madness. The volume also includes a chronology and guides to further reading.

The British Romantic era (ca. 1775-1830) was a time of contradictions, of growth, and of diversity in all aspects of English life. "Romanticism" originally referred to the works of six male poets: Wordsworth, Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron. However, current scholarly attempts to demonstrate that the period encompasses a rich and varied range of poets, essayists, and novelists of both genders have caused the definition to come under debate. Not limiting itself to these six figures, Literary Research and the British Romantic Era discusses English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh resources for both primary and secondary research within the Romantic Era, including general literary research guides; union library catalogs; print and online bibliographies; manuscripts and archives; microfilm and digitization projects; eighteenth and nineteenth century journals and newspapers; contemporary reviews; and electronic texts, journals, and Web resources. Each chapter addresses the best methods to extract relevant information from the research tools employed, enabling scholars to find relevant materials. The strengths and weakness of core and specialized electronic and print research tools and standard search techniques are also examined.