Written 60 years after the bubonic plague swept London, Defoe’s account may have been a hoax, but it still rings true today.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on English literature
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Last year saw the first cohort of English literature students who were born in or beyond 2000 – the so-called digital generation. I wanted to know whether the classics still affected their lives.
How two ambitious men put their own interests ahead of the great writer and his family in an act of institutionally-sanctioned bodysnatching.
The latest version of Dickens’ classic is a refreshingly diverse tale of the triumph of the ordinary heroism over everyday evil.
Memoirs of the morning after: because literature tells us the hangover is about so much more than physical symptoms.
When her contemporaries were engaging with European themes in their novels, Austen remained rooted in her home country.
Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe was one of the first novels (in the modern sense) written in English. Some 300 years later, the complicated castaway and his misadventures continue to shape culture.
The Southern Ocean, as artists have uncovered, is also a treasure trove of cultural narratives.
What was a thoroughly English book has become a multilingual, ever-changing global text continually putting down roots in different cultures.
Even before blockbuster films and television, readers and writers hated reviewers plot-spoiling.
Study uncovers what inner-city teenagers really thing about Hamlet et al.
Her novels and essays, especially Small Island and The Long Song, brought Britain’s slave-owning colonial history home to ordinary Britons, black and white alike.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley believed that we can exercise our moral imagination ‘in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’. Here, then, are some tips for fostering empathy through art.
If you are tired of A Christmas Carol, why not try one of the few Hardy stories where all’s well that ends well.
Writing is a solitary art. But authors shortlisted for the Booker Prize have to perform in public. Here’s how this year’s crop fared.
In the mid-16th century, William Baldwin wrote a satire on Catholicism but waited a decade before publishing it. Sensible man.
Many viewers think that the recent adaptation of Vanity Fair plays fast and loose with Thackeray’s novel. But the writer was surprisingly modern.
Shakespeare can survive a little chipping away at his 400-year reputation.
The socially and ethnically diverse working classes are not being heard. A recent project aims to change that.
Top contributors
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Lecturer in English Literature, University of Oxford
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Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia
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Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Reading
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Senior Lecturer (English and Drama), Australian National University
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Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature, Co-Director, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
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Senior Lecturer School of Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University
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Professor of English and National Teaching Fellow, Birmingham City University
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Adjunct Associate in English, Flinders University
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Professor of Sociology, University College London., UCL
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Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth
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Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University
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Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Sheffield
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Lecturer in English Literature, University of Glasgow
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Lecturer in English Literature, 1350-1660, University of Sussex
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PhD student, University of Warwick
