This volume is an up-to-date explication of various popular and classic subjects and authors arranged chronologically. The book, composed of thirteen essays, examines Blake; Coleridge; Byron; Shelley; Keats; Victorian medievalism; the Victorian reaction to British India; (Ben) Jonsonian elements in Yeats; Yeats and Maud Gonne; the treatment of the Irish civil war and Irish nationalism in Yeats; and the treatment of the Spanish civil war in the selected works of modern fiction and nonfiction. Marked by an originality of approach and a freshness and simplicity, the book takes note of contemporary theoretical, interdisciplinary and cultural discourse drawn from literature, history, politics and religion as necessary. However, it is far from being unnecessarily outweighed by the loaded cliches, oft-repeated jargon and overused euphemisms of modern literary or critical theory. The result is, regardless of its specialized treatment of otherwise commonplace or well-known texts or topics, that the overall discussion is as lucid, introductory and expository as it is deep and scholarly, making the book easily accessible and understandable to non-specialist readers, in addition to specialist researchers and academics.
About the Author: A graduate from New York University, Dr. Jalal Uddin Khan is a Professor of English at the University of Nizwa, Oman. He has published numerous articles in various Asian and Western journals. His recent publications include this book and its companion, Perspectives: Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Literature, also published by CSP (2015). Dr. Khan's teaching and research interests include Old and Middle English; Shakespeare; the long and late eighteenth century; Romantic/Victorian poetry; Romantic women poets; children's literature; Western travel literature about the Middle East through the nineteenth century; and the growth and development of Canadian literature in the early nineteenth century. He has vast experience of teaching a broad range of literature courses in all the major periods and genres of English and American literature, both at introductory/survey and higher levels. This enables him to teach as a generalist as well as a specialist, and contribute to multicultural and interdisciplinary offerings at an institution of higher learning. To both his teaching and scholarship, he brings a sense of global literary relations and international cultural connections, which helps him to participate in the enlightened endeavor of fostering mutual understanding between the Oriental and the Western.