Oxford University Press

Some Versions of Pastoral is one of the most famous books of literary criticism of the twentieth century, with chapters of unrivalled brilliance that include celebrated discussions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Lewis Carroll. This is the first edition to supply a full critical commentary, bringing the book into a new currency for a modern audience.

This is the first scholarly edition of William Empson's The Structure of Complex Words (1951), a classic of literary criticism and a major statement of his work. An extensive introduction and explanatory notes are included, together with a selection of related writings. It will immediately become the standard version of this celebrated text.

John Haffenden's acclaimed biography of William Empson (1906-1984), the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century, is now available in paperback. An authoritative and compelling account and the first of two volumes exploring his remarkable life and work.

This is the concluding volume of a biography of William Empson, one of the foremost poets and literary critics of the twentieth century. It covers his turbulent years writing wartime propaganda for the BBC, through his return to China in the later 1940s to his time at Sheffield University, when he engaged all the more energetically in public controversy.

John Haffenden's acclaimed biography of William Empson (1906-1984), the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century, is now available in paperback. An authoritative and compelling account and the second of two volumes exploring his remarkable life and work.

This book argues that Faulkner unlocked his truest potential as a modernist artist by turning away from the modernity of the Great War toward aspects of modernity closer to his Mississippi home.

Duncan Wu's fascinating portrait of William Hazlitt - the first fully-researched biography, and the first to cover Hazlitt's entire life - reveals one of the greatest journalists in the language, and the principal spokesman of the Romantic age, interacting with every major writer and many other movers and shakers of the era.

William Hazlitt is regarded as the finest prose stylist of the English Romantic period, by virtue of his work as an essayist, metaphysician, and a critic of literature and the fine arts. William Hazlitt: Political Essayist makes the case for including politics in this achievement.