Open University Set Books

Engendering Fictions (Writing in History)

Product Description
Why did turn-of-the-century England produce the kind of writing it did? That deceptively simple question is at the heart of Lyn Pykett's enquiry. She re-examines the beginning of the age of modernism, exploring its origins in nineteenth-century discourses: particularly discourses about women and gender.

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The English Novel in History 1895-1920 (The Novel in History)

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Written especially for students and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, The English Novel in History provides the most comprehensive introduction yet written to early twentieth-century fiction. A stunning work.

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Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

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Hardy's last and most controversial novel, Jude the Obscure caused much outrage when it was published in 1895. Jude Fawley, poor and working-class, longs to study at the University of Christminster, but his ambitions to go to university are thwarted by class prejudice and his entrapment in a loveless marriage. He falls in love with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead, and their refusal to marry when free to do so confirms their rejection of and by the world around them. The shocking fate that overtakes them is an indictment of a rigid and uncaring society. This is the first truly critical edition, taking account of the changes that Hardy made over twenty-five years. Hardy's last, and most controversial novel, this revised edition has the first truly critical text, a new chronology and bibliography, and substantially revised notes.

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Literary Theory: An Introduction

Book DescriptionSynopsisFrom the PublisherFrom the AuthorAbout the Author
Terry Eagleton's classic Literary Theory has served as an inspiration to a whole generation of students and teachers. First published in 1983, "Literary Theory: An Introduction" is probably the best-selling work of literary criticism in the world today. It propelled its author to a position of such influence and controversy within the British academy that even Prince Charles once described him as 'that dreadful Terry Eagleton'. A quarter of a century on from its original publication, "Literary Theory: An Introduction" still conjures the subversion, excitement and exoticism that characterized theory through the 1960s and 70s, when it posed an unprecedented challenge to the literary establishment. Contemporary readers seeking to understand what literature is and what it is for will be inspired and entertained by Eagleton's deft synopses of the major movements in literary studies in the twentieth century.Eagleton has added a new preface to this anniversary edition to address more recent developments in literary studies, including what he describes as 'the growth of a kind of anti-theory', and the idea that literary theory has been institutionalized. Insightful and enlightening, "Literary Theory: An Introduction" remains the essential guide to the field.Updated to include recent intellectual trends.
"This concise and lucid volume offers a satisfying survey of all the major theories, from structuralism in the 1960s to deconstruction today, that have made academic criticism both intriguing and off-putting to the outsider." New York Times Book Review

"The best handbook to those arcane ics and isms, both for academy members and for any civilians who, having heard the distant roar of professorial cannons, might wonder what the skirmishing's about." Voice Literary Supplement

"Literary Theory has the kind of racy readibility that one associates more often with English critics who have set their faces resolutely against theory. . . . It's not just a brilliant polemical essay, it's also a remarkable feat of condensation, explication, and synthesis. I haven't read anything in the field of literary theory that was at the same time so stimulating and so entertaining since the Polemical Introduction to Northrup Frye's Anatomy of Criticism." London Sunday Times

"A brilliant, agile performance: urgent and racy, witty and combative, lucid and compelling." New Statesman (UK)

"A concise guide to the most interesting and mystifying trends in the study of literature over the last fifty years." The NationThe author is Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. He has co-edited with Drew Milne Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). His numerous other books include Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishers, 1990), William Shakespeare (1986), Walter Benjamin (1981), Criticism and Ideology (1976), and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).The author is Thomas Warton Professor of English at the University of Oxford. He has co-edited with Drew Milne Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Blackwell Publishers, 1996). His numerous other books include Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishers, 1990), William Shakespeare (1986), Walter Benjamin (1981), Criticism and Ideology (1976), and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).

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Modern Literary Theory: A Reader

Product DescriptionSynopsisAbout the Author
The new edition of this core text has been thoroughly revised and updated in light of the latest developments in the field. The original structure of the book has been improved and new material has been added. Covering the key theoretical approaches in modern literary theory, the text includes those essays and documents that are essential reading for students of critical theory, with sections on: formalism and structuralism; marxism; feminism; gender and subjectivity; histories and textuality; postmodernism; postcolonialism.

For the first time, the reader also includes extracts from seminal texts by authors such as Marx, Freud, and de Beauvoir - texts which do not necessarily focus on literature but which have had a fundamental influence on the development of literary theory. In addition, the text now includes a section on issues and debates. Focusing not on authors or approaches but rather on leading questions in critical debate, the extracts in this section present opposing points of view on the same issue: Is literary criticism an ethical act? Martha Nussbaum vs Emmanuel Levinas: Is the canon a timeless assembly of great works? Terry Eagleton vs Harold Bloom: Is literature what the academy says it is? Edward Said vs Stanley Fish: Literature and the philosophy of science: Richard Rorty vs Donna HarrawayThe new edition of this core text has been thoroughly revised and updated in light of the latest development in the field. The original structure of the book has been improved and new material has been added. Covering the key theoretical approaches in modern literary theory, the text includes those essays and documents that are essential reading for students of critical theory, with sections on: Formalism and Structuralism; Marxism; Feminism; Gender and Subjectivity; Histories and Textuality; Postmodernism; Postcolonialism. For the first time, the reader also includes extracts from seminal texts by authors such as Marx, Freud, and de Beauvior - texts which do not necessarily focus on literature but which have had a fundamental influence on the development of literary theory. In addition, the text now includes a section on issues and debates. Focusing not on authors or approaches but rather on leading questions in critical debate, the extracts in this section present opposing points of view on the same issue: Is literary criticism an ethical act? Martha Nussbaum vs Emmanuel Levinas Is the canon a timeless assembly of great works?

Terry Eagleton vs Harold Bloom Is literature what the academy says it is? Edward Said vs Stanley Fish Literature and the philosophy of science: Richard Rorty vs Donna HarrawayPatricia Waugh, Durham University, UK Philip Rice, formerly at Coventry University, UK

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Moll Flanders (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
Moll Flanders recounts the story of her extraordinary life, from her birth in Newgate prison to her declining years in married prosperity. After being seduced in the home of her adoptive family she lives off her wits and her beauty, as a whore, 'five times a Wife', and a thief, and is eventually transported to Virginia for her crimes. Rich and penitent, Moll reflects on a world that is both good and evil, just as the reader both abhors and admires her. Arguably the first English novel, Moll Flanders is also a romance, its heroine in perpetual search for a lost familial paradise.Moll Flanders recounts the story of her extraordinary life, from her birth in Newgate prison to her declining years in married prosperity. After being seduced in the home of her adoptive family she lives off her wits and her beauty, as a whore, 'five times a Wife', and a thief, and is eventually transported to Virginia for her crimes. Rich and penitent, Moll reflects on a world that is both good and evil, just as the reader both abhors and admires her. Arguably the first English novel, Moll Flanders is also a romance, its heroine in perpetual search for a lost familial paradise.

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New Grub Street (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular journalism, and mass communication began to leave their mark on the life of intellectuals. Projecting a strong sense of the London in which his characters struggle, Gissing also illuminates `the valley of the shadow of books', where the spirit of alienation that created modernism was already stirring.The story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. It tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the 19th century.

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Modern Classics)

Synopsis
The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus' Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'.

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Selected Poems (Classics)

Synopsis
A substantial selection of Tennyson's poetry, edited according to the principles of the Penguin English Poets series. This volume concentrates on the period characterized by "Maud"(1855) and "In Memoriam" (1850).

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Sons and Lovers (Penguin Modern Classics)

Synopsis
Lawrence's first major novel explores ordinary working-class life from the inside. Describing the intimacies enforced by a tightly-knit mining community, it is also the story of Paul Morel, who is caught between his need for his family and his quest to define himself sexually and emotionally.

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The Story of an African Farm (Oxford World's Classics)

Product Description
This pioneering work was a cause celebre when it appeared in London, transforming the shape and course of the late Victorian novel. Lynall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears: the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.

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Textual Scholarship: An Introduction (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol 1417)

Product Description
Originally published in 1992 in hardcover, this paperback features a newly corrected text and a revised and expanded bibliography, which is updated to 1994. The book is the first to address the entire spectrum of textual scholarship: enumerative and research bibliography; descriptive and analytical bibliography ; paleography and typography; historical and textual bibliography; textual criticism and textual theory; scholarly editing
Designed for editors, literary and textual critics, and students, this historical and methodological survey is richly illustrated with line drawings and photographs. There is a bibliography of scholarship (including a list of standard editions in various fields), an appendix of illustrated types of scholarly editions with interpretive commentary, and a full index. The text is suitable for courses in research methods, critical editing, philology, paleography, manuscript studies, publishing, publishing history, and the history of the book and is an essential aid to graduate students in language and literature.

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The Waves (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsisFrom the Inside FlapAbout the Author
Woolf described this work on the title-page of the first draft as `the life of anybody'. The Waves (1931) traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. The Waves was conceived, brooded on, and written during a highly political phase in Woolf's career, when she was speaking on issues of gender and of class. This was also the period when her love affair with Vita Sackville-West was at its most intense. The work is often described as if it were the product of a secluded, disembodied sensibility. Yet its writing is supremely engaged and engaging, providing an experience which the reader is unlikely to forget.Woolf described this work on the title-page of the first draft as 'the life of anybody'. "The Waves" (1931) traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. "The Waves" was conceived, brooded on, and written during a highly political phase in Woolf's career, when she was speaking on issues of gender and of class. This was also the period when her love affair with Vita Sackville-West was at its most intense. The work is often described as if it were the product of a secluded, disembodied sensibility. Yet its writing is supremely engaged and engaging, providing an experience which the reader is unlikely to forget.Tracing the lives of a group of six friends, The Waves follows
their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While their
individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, this novel
is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that conveys the inner
lives of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets,
their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query
the relationship of past to present and the meaning of life itself, in a
haunting, atmospheric and sensuous exploration of the complexities of human
experience.Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

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