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  3. Literature in Context

Understanding of literary texts can be greatly enhanced by an appreciation of the context within which their authors lived and worked. Each of these volumes focuses on an individual writer, offering lively, accessible and relatively short essays, by leading scholars, on the many contexts - literary, political, intellectual, social and cultural - that have a bearing on his or her work. Biographical and literary influences on the writer, publishing history and the creative afterlife of the work are also addressed. The first volumes in the series include major writers from Ben Jonson to James Joyce, from Milton to Joseph Conrad. Future volumes will focus on Chaucer, Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Marcel Proust, among many others. Each volume offers comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.

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81 results in Literature in Context

Page 1 of 5

María Irene Fornés In Context
  • Edited by Brian Eugenio Herrera, Anne García-Romero
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • María Irene Fornés is both one of the most influential and one of the least well-known US theatermakers of the late twentieth century, with former students including leading US playwrights, directors and scholars. This is the first major scholarly collection to elucidate Fornés' rich life, work, and legacy. Providing concise and wide-ranging contributions from notable scholars, practitioners and advocates drawn from the academic and artistic communities most informed and inspired by her work, this engaging volume provides diverse points of entry to specialists and students alike.

Sean O'Casey in Context
  • Edited by James Moran
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    01 June 2026
  • Sean O'Casey is one of Ireland's best-known writers. He is the most frequently performed playwright in the history of the Irish National Theatre, and his work is often revived onstage elsewhere. O'Casey is also widely studied at schools, colleges, and universities in the English-speaking world. This book offers a new contextualisation of this famous writer's work, revisiting his association with Irish nationalism, historical revisionism, and celebrated contemporaries such as W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. The volume also brings O'Casey's work into contact with topics including disability studies, gender and sexuality, postcolonialism, ecocriticism, and race. Sean O'Casey in Context explores a number of existing ideas about O'Casey in the light of new academic developments, and updates our understanding of this important writer by taking into account recent scholarly thinking and a range of theatrical productions from around the globe.

August Wilson in Context
  • Edited by Khalid Y. Long, Isaiah Matthew Wooden
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • August Wilson is one of the twentieth century's most important and acclaimed playwrights. This volume demonstrates Wilson's significance to contemporary theatre, culture, and politics by providing fresh and compelling insights into his life, practices, and contributions as an artist and public intellectual. Across four thematically organized sections, contributors situate Wilson's work in his social, cultural and political contexts, examine ongoing developments in Wilson studies, explore the production contexts of his plays, and explicate his dramaturgical sensibilities and strategies. This is the authoritative guide to Wilson's career and artistic legacy for students, theatre practitioners, and general readers interested in this remarkable figure.

Percy Shelley in Context
  • Edited by Ross Wilson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2025
    Print publication:
    31 May 2025
  • Percy Shelley was a writer in the broadest sense – poet, pamphleteer, philosopher, translator, and correspondent – and one of the most eccentric, fascinating figures of his age. Yet he is emphatically of our age too, continuing to influence contemporary writers, to be referenced in popular culture, and to inspire social and political movements. Bringing together a wide range of contributors from different critical perspectives, this vivid and accessible volume sets Shelley's work in its many contexts – from ancient literature to contemporary poetry, from his travels around Britain and Europe to his global reception, and from his rivalries with his poetic peers to his often-strained relations with his family. Despite his short life, Shelley emerges as a vital literary presence.

Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context
  • Edited by Martin Dubois
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the most innovative British poets of the nineteenth century. This book provides an authoritative guide to the ideas and influences shaping Hopkins's life and writing. Consisting of thirty-eight essays by leading scholars, the book covers topics that have long attracted scholarly attention while also responding to recent critical trends. It considers Hopkins's formal innovations alongside his theological and philosophical ideas. Chapters examine his Victorian aesthetic and cultural contexts as well as the significance of his ecological imagination and response to environmental degradation. Hopkins's poetry was not widely known until the 1930s, and the book closes by discussing the distinctive nature of its reception and influence. Informed by original research but accessibly written, the essays enable a fresh engagement with the originality of Hopkins's writing and thought.

Oliver Goldsmith in Context
  • Edited by Michael Griffin, David O'Shaughnessy
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    07 November 2024
  • Oliver Goldsmith has a claim to be the only eighteenth-century author who wrote canonical works in prose fiction, poetry, and drama. An Irish writer working at the centre of the British and Irish Enlightenments, with all the rich complications of identity this entailed, he authored The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, works that number among the greatest literary productions of the century. He was also a major historian, biographer, journalist, and translator operating at the heart of literary London. Through four sections covering Goldsmith's Life and Career; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Contexts; Literary Contexts; and Critical Fortunes and Afterlives, this volume engages with a wide range of illuminating topics that will allow both new and experienced readers of Goldsmith to understand more deeply the impact he had on his times and the powerful influence he exerted on subsequent literary culture.

Goethe in Context
  • Edited by Charlotte Lee
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • One of the most prolific and versatile writers of all time, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749–1832) made an impact that continues to extend far beyond his native Germany. The variety of human questions and experiences treated in his works is arguably without parallel. He also had (for his era) an unusually long life, which spanned the French Revolution, the end of the Holy Roman Empire and subsequent reshaping of the German-speaking world, and the rapid onset of industrial modernity. In thirty-seven short essays, leading international scholars explore Goethe's life and times, his literary works, his activity in the realms of art, philosophy and natural science, his reception of – and indeed by – other cultures, and, finally, the resonance of his work in our time. The aim of this collection is to open as many windows as possible onto Goethe's wide-ranging intellectual and practical activity, and to give a sense of his ongoing importance.

Jonathan Swift in Context
  • Edited by Joseph Hone, Pat Rogers
  • Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    09 May 2024
  • Jonathan Swift remains the most important and influential satirist in the English language. The author of Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Tale of a Tub, in addition to vast numbers of political pamphlets, satirical verses, sermons, and other kinds of text, Swift is one of the most versatile writers in the literary canon. His writings were always closely intertwined with the English and Irish worlds in which he lived. The forty-four essays collected in Jonathan Swift in Context advance the latest research on Swift in a way that will engage undergraduate students while also remaining useful for scholars. Reflecting the best of current and ongoing scholarship, the contextual approach advanced by this volume will help to make Swift's works even more powerful and resonant to modern audiences.

Robert Lowell In Context
  • Edited by Thomas Austenfeld, Grzegorz Kość
  • Published online:
    28 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Robert Lowell was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. This volume explores the various contexts of Lowell's life and work and evaluates his oeuvre from new perspectives. Individual chapters address his relation to the South, his religious evolution, aspects of his marriages and private life, his bipolar disorder seen through new theories of mental illness, his work as a letter writer and a connoisseur of art and photography. The book also introduces new parameters for a contemporary study of Lowell, commenting on current debates about race and privilege, feminism, ecoconsciousness, his engagement with the natural environment as well as his friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Penn Warren.

Pirandello in Context
  • Edited by Patricia Gaborik
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    21 March 2024
  • For students of Luigi Pirandello's life and works, this volume provides a multi-faceted view spanning the many genres in which he wrote, from poetry and essays to fiction and drama. It gives a true sense of Pirandello's remarkable sensitivity to place – from his native Sicily to Germany and Latin America – and of how his perspective was shaped by a wide range of interlocutors with varying professional backgrounds, from contemporary philosophers to fellow playwrights like Bernard Shaw, directors like Max Reinhardt and the actress Marta Abba. Diverse contributors explore the sheer genre-bending originality of Pirandello's humor, metatheatre, and fantastic tales, and reveal how profound shifts in society, culture, and politics in his time – Freud, Futurism, Fascism – conditioned not just his thought but also his meteoric rise to fame. A final section is dedicated to Pirandello's legacy in literature and drama throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

W. G. Sebald in Context
  • Edited by Uwe Schütte
  • Published online:
    24 August 2023
    Print publication:
    07 September 2023
  • The German academic and writer W. G. Sebald made an astounding ascent into the canon of world literature. In this volume, leading experts from both the English- and the German-speaking worlds explore his celebrated prose works published in the short span from 1996 to his premature death in 2001. Special attention is paid to Sebald's unpublished texts and books awaiting translation into English. The volume – illustrated with many unpublished archive images – scrutinizes the dual nature of Sebald's life and work, located between Germany and England, academic and literary writing, vilification and idolization. Through nearly forty essays on a broad range of topics, W. G. Sebald in Context achieves a revision of our understanding of Sebald, defying many clichés about him. Particular attention is paid to the manifold ways in which Sebald's writings exerted a legacy far beyond literature, especially in the areas of art, cinema, and popular music.

Wilkie Collins in Context
  • Edited by William Baker, Richard Nemesvari
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • This collection of essays by international scholars celebrates the 200th anniversary of Wilkie Collins's birth by exploring his unconventional life alongside his works, critical responses to his writings and their afterlife, and the literary and cultural contexts which shaped his fiction. Topics discussed include gender, science and medicine, music, law, race and empire, media adaptations, neo-Victorianism, disability, and ethics. Along with an analysis of his novels, the essays included also recognize the importance of his short stories, journalism, and contributions to Victorian theatre, most notably illuminating the strong connections between sensation fiction and melodrama, as well as exploring his influence on film and TV. Engaging with yet also delving far beyond the famous novels, this volume promotes awareness of Collins' remarkable and diverse writerly achievements and paints a vivid portrait of an author whose fluctuating reputation among contemporary critics stands in stark contrast to his immense and still-enduring popularity.

Susan Glaspell in Context
  • Edited by J. Ellen Gainor
  • Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023
  • Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

Daniel Defoe in Context
  • Edited by Albert J. Rivero, George Justice
  • Published online:
    27 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • Innovative in its structure and approach, Daniel Defoe in Context contains 42 essays by leading scholars illuminating the life, times, and world of Daniel Defoe. Defoe is one of the most important literary figures in English history, thanks not only to his pioneering novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, but also to his notable works in journalism, travel writing, conduct literature, and verse, both satiric and serious. Written with general readers and students in mind, the essays in this volume provide up-to-date knowledge about eighteenth-century literature, culture, and history in a high quality, clearly written, but completely accessible form. Together they demonstrate the ways not only in which Defoe's world shaped his writing, but also in which Defoe's writings profoundly affected his world, and therefore our world.

Salman Rushdie in Context
  • Edited by Florian Stadtler
  • Published online:
    23 March 2023
    Print publication:
    30 March 2023
  • Salman Rushdie in Context discusses Rushdie's life and work in the context of the multiple geographies he has inhabited and the wider socio-cultural contexts in which his writing is emerging, published and read. This book reveals the evolving political trajectory around transnationalism, multiculturalism and its discontents, so prominently engaged with by Salman Rushdie in relation to South Asia, its diasporas, Britain, and the USA in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Focused on the aesthetic, biographical, cultural, creative, historical and literary contexts of his works, the book reveals his deep engagement with processes of decolonization, emergent nationalisms in South Asia, Europe and the USA, and diasporic identity constructions and how they have been affected by globalisation. The book traces how, through his fiction and non-fiction, Rushdie has profoundly shaped the discussion of important questions of global citizenship and migration that continue to resonate today.

Chekhov in Context
  • Edited by Yuri Corrigan
  • Published online:
    16 February 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023
  • Premier playwright of modern theater and trailblazer of the short story, Anton Chekhov was also a practising doctor, journalist, writer of comic sketches, philanthropist and activist. This volume provides an accessible guide to Chekhov's multifarious interests and influences, with over 30 succinct chapters covering his rich intellectual milieu and his tumultuous socio-political environment, as well as the legacy of his work in over two centuries of interdisciplinary cultures and media around the world. With a Preface by Cornel West, a chronology and Further Reading list, this collection is the essential guide to Chekhov's writing and the manifold worlds he inhabited.

Tolstoy in Context
  • Edited by Anna A. Berman
  • Published online:
    05 January 2023
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • Likened to a second Tsar in Russia and attaining prophet-like status around the globe, Tolstoy made an impact on literature and the arts, religion, philosophy, and politics. His novels and stories both responded to and helped to reshape the European and Russian literary traditions. His non-fiction incensed readers and drew a massive following, making Tolstoy an important religious force as well as a stubborn polemicist in many fields. Through his involvement with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, his aid in relocating the Doukhobors to Canada, his correspondence with American abolitionists and his polemics with scientists in the periodical press, Tolstoy engaged a vast array of national and international contexts of his time in his life and thought. This volume introduces those contexts and situates Tolstoy—the man and the writer—in the rich and tumultuous period in which his intellectual and creative output came to fruition.

Roberto Bolaño In Context
  • Edited by Jonathan B. Monroe
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • From his first fifteen years in Chile, to his nine years in Mexico City from 1968 to 1977, to the quarter of a century he lived and worked in the Blanes-Barcelona area on the Costa Brava in Spain through his death in 2003, Roberto Bolaño developed into an astonishingly diverse, prolific writer. He is one of the most consequential and widely read of his generation in any language. Increasingly recognized not only in Latin America, but as a major figure in World Literature, Bolaño is an essential writer for the 21st century world. This volume provides a comprehensive mapping of the pivotal contexts, events, stages, and influences shaping Bolaño's writing. As the wide-ranging investigations of this volume's 30 distinguished scholars show, Bolaño's influence and impact will shape literary cultures worldwide for years to come.

David Foster Wallace in Context
  • Edited by Clare Hayes-Brady
  • Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • David Foster Wallace is regarded as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book introduces readers to the literary, philosophical and political contexts of Wallace's work. An accessible and useable resource, this volume conceptualizes his work within long-standing critical traditions and with a new awareness of his importance for American literary studies. It shows the range of issues and contexts that inform the work and reading of David Foster Wallace, connecting his writing to diverse ideas, periods and themes. Essays cover topics on gender, sex, violence, race, philosophy, poetry and geography, among many others, guiding new and long-standing readers in understanding the work and influence of this important writer.

Langston Hughes in Context
  • Edited by Vera M. Kutzinski, Anthony Reed
  • Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022
  • Langston Hughes was among the most influential African American writers of the twentieth century. He inspired and challenged readers from Harlem to the Caribbean, Europe, South America, Asia, the African continent, and beyond. To study Langston Hughes is to develop a new sense of the twentieth century. He was more than a man of his times; emerging as a key member of the Harlem Renaissance, his poems, plays, journalism, translations, and prose fiction documented and shaped the world around him. The twenty-nine essays in this volume engage with his at times conflicting investments in populist and modernist literature, his investments in freedom in and beyond the US, and the many genres through which he wrote. Langston Hughes in Context considers the places and experiences that shaped him, the social and cultural contexts in which he wrote, thought and travelled, and the international networks that forged and secured his life and reputation.

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