The Heart Of England 1906

As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

In this 2000 collection, an international team of contributors examine relationships between modernist poetry and place.

These poetic and highly personal pieces describe Edward Thomas's wanderings through the English countryside, taking in meadows, farms, inns, maypoles, churches and wildlife. Whether exploring the Kent weald or the heart of England, describing a crisp winter morning or a heady August day, evoking the scent of honeysuckle or the primeval atmosphere of an ancient wood, Thomas brings the countryside alive through precise observation and vivid, lyrical prose. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it. English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).

Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies is a collection of essays written by European and North American scholars who argue that nature and culture can no longer be thought of in oppositional, mutually exclusive terms. They are united in an effort to push the theoretical limits of ecocriticism towards a more rigorous investigation of nature's critical potential as a concept that challenges modern culture's philosophical assumptions, epistemological convictions, aesthetic principles, and ethical imperatives. This volume offers scholars and students of literature, culture, history, philosophy, and linguistics new insights into the ongoing transformation of ecocriticism into an innovative force in international and interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies.

`God made the country, man made the town.' William Cowper's words, written two centuries ago, underline an idealisation of rural life and landscape which persists to this day. What are the main historical processes and ideas underlying the continuing attachment to the countryside? How have these shaped popular values and lifestyles influenced artistic expression, defined attitudes to nature, country life and 8andscape, and affected the development of both rural and urban landscapes? What are the consequences for society and the environment? These are the central questions addressed in this book. The Countryside Ideal draws together diverse images of landscape to explore this preoccupation with place, culture and representation in the West.

Challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernismIn this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H.G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity.a These adepartments war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, childrens literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, The Great Edwardian Emporium offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.

This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him. His great friend Robert Frost wrote 'his poetry is so very brave, so unconsciously brave.' Apart from a most illuminating understanding of his poetry, Dr Wilson shows how Thomas' life alone makes for absorbing reading: his early marriage, his dependence on laudanum, his friendships with Joseph Conrad, Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke and Hilaire Belloc among others. The novelist Eleanor Farjeon entered into a curious menage a trois with him and his wife. He died in France in 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras. This is the stuff of which myths are made and posterity has been quick to oblige. But this has tended to obscure his true worth as a writer, as Dr Wilson argues. Edward Thomas's poems were not published until some months after his death, but they have never since been out of print. Described by Ted Hughes as 'the father of us all', Thomas's distinctively modern sensibility is probably the one most in tune with our twenty-first century outlook. He occupies a crucial place in the development of twentieth century poetry.

Drawing on an eclectic range of primary and secondary sources Chaplin examines the development of darts in the context of English society in the early twentieth century. He reveals how darts was transformed during the interwar years to become one of the most popular recreations in England, not just amongst working class men and, to a lesser extent, working class women but even (to some extent) among the middle and upper classes. This book assesses the social, economic and cultural forces behind this transformation. This work also considers the growth of the darts manufacturing industry and assesses the overall effect the growing popularity of darts had on interwar society and popular culture, with particular reference to the changing culture and form of the English public house. This original study will be of interest to sports historians, social historians, business historians, sociologists and sports scientists.

Edward Thomas volunteered when he was 37 years old and a father of three and was killed, as an artillery officer, during the first hour of the Arras offensive, on April 9th, 1917. In the two years before his death, he wrote the 144 poems which ensured a place for him among the poets of his generation. Though all his poems had been written OC under stormOCOs wingOCO, Thomas was not a war poet in the sense that Owen, Sassoon or Rosenberg were war poets. Before he turned to poetry in December 1914, he..."