A Companion to British Literature, 4 Volume Set

A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past thirteen centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and places in Britain and demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to studying the subject. Featuring a broad range of expert contributors, including distinguished academics and rising stars, the Companion examines the historical, social, political, domestic, linguistic, institutional and material contexts in which British literature has been produced.

Essays in the Companion discuss the real and imaginary geography in which British literature plays out, as well as the importance of technological contexts of literature, including transformations in book production and circulation. With special attention to individual genres, in historical context, the Companion discusses both formal and technical aspects of the subject. Throughout the volumes, essays take a highly contextual approach, joining readings across geographical, cultural, institutional, economic and mediological contexts in a unique way. The Companion has been carefully organized to support readers and; it includes a general index, and a thematic table of contents, enabling e-readers to follow numerous discursive threads across various chapters of the book.

Robert DeMaria, Jr. is the Henry Noble MacCracken Professor of English Literature at Vassar College, USA. He is the General Editor of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, the editor of the Johnsonian News Letter, and the author of Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning (1986), The Life of Samuel Johnson (Blackwell, 1993), and Samuel Johnson and the Life of Reading (1997). He is also the editor of Classical Literature and Its Reception (with Robert Brown, Blackwell, 2007) and British Literature 1640-1789: An Anthology (Blackwell, 1996; 3rd edn, 2008).

Heesok Chang is Associate Professor of English at Vassar College, USA. He is the author of the forthcoming Wiley Blackwell title Handbook to British Modernism, and is currently working on a book on literary modernism and media technologies. In addition, he is the author of articles on critical theory and literary modernism.

Samantha Zacher is an Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University, USA,  where she teaches Old and Middle English Literature. She is the author of Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies (2009) and co-editor, with Andy Orchard, of New Readings in the Vercelli Book (2009). Her new monograph, Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People is forthcoming (2013). She is also editing a new collection of essays entitled Imagining the Jew: Jewishness in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (forthcoming, 2013).