Acknowledgements; Preface; Introduction; 1. On sundry seductresses; 2. The art of charming the senses; 3. Refinement and barbarity; 4. Angels and demons; 5. Social seduction; 6. The writer as seducer: first attempts; 7. To please or not to please; 8. Anti-seduction and self-seduction; Bibliography; Index; Names Cited

The purpose of this book is to examine the many heterosexual configurations in the plays and to demonstrate by the accumulation of evidence that the actions of Shaw's chief characters are typically the result of their sexual concerns, often coupled with issues of principle. This book is a must for all Shaw specialists and will be of great interest to teachers and students of English and Continental drama and literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Includes both books and articles.

Born and brought up in a village-tradesman family, he broke away, re-inventing himself first as a professional architect, and then as a successful man of letters. The imagined societies of his rural novels are significantly selective: he ignores, marginalizes, or treats dismissively the mass of rural poor, the agricultural labourers, whose condition was a running concern of the nineteenth century. His novels focus on the independent group to which his family belonged: 'an interesting and better-informed class, ranking distinctly above' the agricultural labourers, as he pointedly tells us. His fictions are coloured with a rich rural conservatism where social attitudes are concerned. Hardy's Wessex countryside is to be valued as metaphor, not reportage: for the latter we have to turn to that huge bulk of contemporary material highlighting the situation of the agricultural poor, nowhere more severely felt than in Dorset. It is no wonder that his early readers were puzzled.

As the present volume reveals in remarkable detail life was immensely precarious for those who tried to make their living by the pen. Party writers rarely received adequate remuneration for their pains, and Oldmixon, always short of money, was reduced to writing supplicating letters to publishers such as genial Jacob Tonson. It is letters such as these which, when taken in conjunction with Oldmixon's own Memoirs of the Press (1742), offer unique details about the life of the professional writer, and reveal the significance of the sub-title of Professor Rogers's book: Politics and Professional Authorship in Early Hanoverian England. Hardship had forced Oldmixon to turn from writing plays and poetry to writing political pamphlets and essays. Yet despite submitting to labour at the Press like a Horse in a Mill (as James Ralph graphically put it)Oldmixon was never financially secure.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.