A brilliant new anthology that shows how fiction was reinvented in the twelfth century after an absence of hundreds of years. Essential for all students of medieval literature, Early Fiction in England includes extracts by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Marie de France, Chaucer and many others, in new translations and with illuminating introductions. Before the twelfth century, fiction had completely disappeared in Europe. In this important and provocative book, Laura Ashe shows how English writers brought it back, composing new tales about King Arthur, his knights and other heroes and heroines in Latin, French and English. Why did fiction disappear, and why did it come to life again to establish itself the dominant form of literature ever since? And what do we even mean by the term 'fiction'? Gathering extracts from the most important texts of the period by Wace, Marie de France, Chaucer and others, this volume offers an absorbing and surprising introduction to the earliest fiction in England. The anthology includes a general introduction by Laura Ashe, introductions to each extract, explanatory notes and other useful editorial materials. All French and Latin texts have been newly translated, while Middle English texts include helpful glosses. Laura Ashe is a University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her first book Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) has been followed by numerous articles and edited collections; she is now writing the newOxford English Literary History vol. 1: 1000-1350 (Oxford University Press).

This is an ambitious and fascinating analysis of early twentieth-century English literature from Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence and Forster through figures like Joyce and Woolf to writers such as Evelyn Waugh. There are chapters on the younger writers of the age as well as the more popular minor writers like Buchan and Dornford Yates.

This book explores the relationship between H.G. Wells's scientific romances and the discourses of science in the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century. It investigates how Wells utilizes his early fiction to participate in a range of topical scientific disputes and, increasingly, as a means to instigate social reform.

Inspired by a box of wooden toy soldiers given as a present to her elder brother Branwell in 1826, Charlotte Bronte created, together with her siblings, a series of tales set in the imaginary realm of Glass Town. In 'The Green Dwarf', against the backdrop of war, the arrogant aristocrat Colonel Percy and the enigmatic Mr Leslie are vying for the affections of the beautiful Lady Emily. Soon, with the rivals both on the front line, and with the scheming Percy hatching a plot that involves the mysterious Green Dwarf, Leslie finds himself facing danger on all sides...Full of tragedy and passion, love and rivalry, the five sweeping tales contained in this volume display the precocious talent, lively imagination and flair for storytelling of the young Charlotte Bronte.Contains: 'The Green Dwarf and Other Early Fiction', 'The Green Dwarf', 'The Foundling', 'The Secret', 'Lily Hart', 'The Spell' and 'Tales of the Islanders'.

Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexuality, 1570-1640 brings together twelve new essays which situate the arguments about the multiple constructions of sexualities in prose fiction within contemporary critical debates about the body, gender, desire, print culture, postcoloniality, and cultural geography. Looking at Sidney's Arcadia , Wroth's Urania , Lyly's Euphues ; fictions by Gascoigne, Riche, Parry, and Brathwaite; as well as Hellenic romances, rogue fictions, and novelle, the essays expand and challenge current critical arguments about the gendering of labour, female eroticism, queer masculinity, sodomy, male friendship, cross-dressing, heteroeroticism, incest, and the gendering of poetic creativity.

Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

'Even if he had written nothing else', Ivan Bunin wrote of Chekhov's early stories, 'we would still have said that an amazing mind had flashed through Russian literature'. His youthful work immediately established Chekhov as a leading writer of both comic and serious fiction. The humorous tales have delighted Russians since the 1880s, while the many admirers of the more serious stories include James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield. In this selection, stories withpunchy endings jostle with outrageous paradies, fracical situations, the pastoral comedy of Romance with Double-Bass, and the absurdist humour of classics such as The Death of a Civil Servant. But the volume also contains some of Chekhov's finest stories about children, 'non-love' stories like TheLittle Joke and The Kiss, the hauntingly lyrical Easter Night, and the chilling Let Me Sleep. This translation does full justice to the masterful range of the young Chekhov; for those unfamiliar with his early work this edition will be a revelation.

This Companion provides an engaging account of the postcolonial novel, from Joseph Conrad to Jean Rhys. Covering subjects from disability and diaspora to the sublime and the city, this Companion reveals the myriad traditions that have shaped the postcolonial literary landscape.

In this volume the author describes more than 3000 short stories, novels, and plays with science fiction elements, from earliest times to 1930. He includes imaginary voyages, utopias, Victorian boys' books, dime novels, pulp magazine stories, British scientific romances and mainstream work with science fiction elements. Many of these publications are extremely rare, surviving in only a handful of copies, and most of them have never been described before.

Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.