First published in 1653, The Compleat Angler is one of the most influential environmental texts ever written. Addressing a politically and religiously polarized nation devastated by warfare, disease, ecological degradation, and climate change, Izaak Walton’s famous fishing treatise stages a radical thought experiment: how might humanity’s enhanced relationship with the natural world generate a new kind of sustaining—and sustainable—social order beyond the traditional boundaries of the church, the state, and the biological family? Challenging the current scholarly consensus that reads Walton’s how-to manual as a conservative polemic camouflaged by fishlore, Marjorie Swann examines this richly complicated portrayal of the natural world through an ecocritical lens and explores other neglected aspects of Walton’s writings, including his depictions of social hierarchy, gender, and sexuality. In the process, Swann analyzes a host of noncanonical environmental texts and provides a groundbreaking reappraisal of Charles Cotton’s “Part II” of The Compleat Angler. This study extends the hydrological turn in early modern ecocriticism and demonstrates how, as a genre, angling manuals provide new insights into the environmental, cultural, social, and literary history of early modern England. Taking its place alongside landmark works of ecocriticism such as Green Shakespeare and Milton and Ecology, this fresh and timely reassessment of The Compleat Angler rightly ranks Izaak Walton among the most important environmental writers of the early modern era.

The history of printing, books, and libraries, is confined only to a limited extent within the boundaries of individual countries. There are, indeed, few historical developments which have played a more universal role, in reaction against all kinds of particularism, than type design, printing, book production, publishing, illustration, binding, librarianship, journal ism, and related subjects. Their history should be assessed and studied primarily in an international, not in a local, context. The bibliographical resources, however, which the historian of these sub jects has at his disposal correspond hardly at all to the essentially inter national character of the object of his studies. Since the appearance of the retrospective bibliography of BIG MORE and WYMAN, covering the subject comprehensively up to r88o, the only current bibliography has been the lnternationale Bibliographie des Buck-und Bi bliothekswesens. Covering a representative part of newly published liter ature, it appeared from rgz8, but did not survive the Second World War. More recently, several useful, but limited, bibliographies have appeared.

Focusing on the turbulent years between the execution of Charles I and the triumph of William III, Steven N. Zwicker reads English literature as a series of brilliant and deeply engaged polemical contests. Zwicker juxtaposes overtly polemical writings—pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads—with canonical works, including epic, historical verse, tragedy, and satire, in order to demonstrate how literature not only reflected on political action but also formed an important site of political exchange. Zwicker maintains that the sources of Restoration culture lay within the civil war years of the 1640s and that the memory of those years shaped writing and politics for the remainder of the century. In sensitive readings of such classic texts as Walton's Compleat Angler, Marvell's First Anniversary and Last Instructions, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, he shows how these texts both engaged with pamphlet, squib, and broadside and challenged one another over the possession of cultural authority. Zwicker's analysis provides a new understanding of the connections between politics and aesthetics in the later seventeenth century and an appreciation for the texture of this culture. Successfully integrating literary history and political analysis, Lines of Authority will be valuable reading for a broad audience in the fields of Restoration and Protectorate literature, literary history, cultural and intellectual history, and the history of political thought.

This work has been revised and updated to include the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2nd ed), the Dewey Decimal System Classification (21st ed) and the Library of Congress Classification Schedules. The text details the essential elements of the International Standard Bibliographic Description; introduces the associated OCLC/MARC specifications; and more. The downloadable resources give more than 500 PowerPoint slides and graphics identical to the text, in addition to scans of the title page, and title page verso and other illustrations that support examples from Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2nd ed).

'Man and the Natural World, an encyclopaedic study of man's relationship to animals and plants, is completely engrossing ... It explains everything - why we eat what we do, why we plant this and not that, why we keep pets, why we like some animals and not others, why we kill the things we kill and love the things we love ... It is often a funny book and one to read again and again' Paul Theroux, Sunday Times 'The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us' Hilary Mantel, New York Review of Books 'A treasury of unusual historical anecdote ... a delight to read and a pleasure to own' Auberon Waugh, Sunday Telegraph 'A dense and rich work ... the return to the grass roots of our own environmental convictions is made by the most enchantingly minor paths' Ronald Blythe, Guardian

The Collected Critical Writings of Geoffrey Hill gathers more than forty years of Hill's published criticism, in a revised final form, and also adds much new work. It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic whom A. N. Wilson has called 'probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose'. In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context - political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's 'The Night', his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary. Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in 'Our Word is Our Bond', 'Language, Suffering, and Value', and 'Poetry and Value'. In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence.