820. Books on English & Old English literatures

Further Reading:

Walter Chandoha The Literary Gardener, 1997.

For those who love gardens and the plants that comprise them, professional garden photographer Walter Chandoha provides images from his own gardens accompanied by facts, poems, and prose about gardening from his sizable collection of gardening books, both vintage and contemporary. The quotes are from writers of all types on the wonders of growing things.

T.S. Eliot Selected Essays, 1917-1932, 1934.

Renowned 20th-century playwright, poet, and literary critic T.S. Eliot compiled this collection of his most important literary criticisms written between 1918 and 1932. The expanded edition published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt contains annotations with footnotes and biographical information about Eliot.

Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1980.

Feminist literary scholars Gilbert and Gubar expose the underpinnings behind the groundbreaking realization that “the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual.” This classic work is considered one of the most important works of literary criticism from the 20th century.

Ramie Targoff Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England, 2001.

English professor Ramie Targoff examines the relationship between prayer and poetry after the Protestant Reformation. Using examples from Shakespeare to George Herbert, Targoff revises the earlier view that prayer influenced poetry to the reverse. He contends that through poetry that public prayer was reshaped.

Janet Todd, ed. A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800, 1985.

Internationally acclaimed literary scholar Janet Todd provides a look at the lives of early women writers such as Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, along with many who were less well-known.

For more information on the Further Reading series, see Further Reading: Start Here.