Vol.1 Britain and the Commonwealth - Vol.2 United States of America.; A guide to the greatest writers, alphabetically arranged.

"Although many literary critics assert that the Catholic novel is in decline, Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth: The English Catholic Novel Today argues that there is still vitality in the English Catholic novel at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Marian Crowe relates this fiction to recent developments in the post-Vatican II Church and elucidates intriguing possibilities for future Catholic fiction. In addition to discussing the theory and history of the Catholic novel, the book provides an in-depth study of four contemporary English Catholic novelists."--BOOK JACKET.

Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.

Robert Bridges, poet laureate of England from 1913 to 1930, is an important cultural link between the Victorian Age and the modern period. This bibliography updates and expands George McKay's A Bibliography of Robert Bridges (1933) and is the first gathering of reviews, articles, essays, books, and other scholarly notes about Bridges.

David Daiches (1912-2005) was the first Professor of English at the University of Sussex. This work includes essays on his literary achievements in the areas of Scottish Literature, the Novel, Poetry and New/Historical Criticism and the American connection, and the academic as populariser, by distinguished scholars and critics.

Providing detailed analysis of the recurrent structural and thematic traits in Peter Ackroyd's first nine novels, this work sets out to show how they grow out of the tension created by two apparently contradictory tendencies. These are, on the one hand, the metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history, to enhance the linguistic component of writing, and to underline the constructedness of the world created in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of historiographic metafiction; and on the other, the attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in Ackroyd's fictional treatment of London as a mystic centre of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodern writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing and John Fowles.

"The list is long. Each of the artists who took his or her life did so for unique reasons. But distinct patterns do emerge: several questioned their own abilities as writers; some felt guilt at being gay or lesbian; others suffered debilitating illnesses or believed they were going mad; still others succumbed to manic depression. But all faced the agonies considered peculiar to artists: the constant struggle to create and an overwhelming sense of alienation from a hostile or indifferent public. Final Drafts is both a biographical treatment and a psychological examination of the authors of the past century who left this world on their own terms. It is also a devoted examination of references to suicide in literature, both in the authors' own communications and in the stories of writers who contemplated suicide but decided to live."--BOOK JACKET.