1841 was one of the most productive, varied, and imaginatively moving periods of John Clare’s long poetic career. Against a background of asylum, escape home, and then forced removal to a second asylum, he wrote during this single year over 3,000 lines of original poetry and paraphrase, in addition to a substantial body of prose.

John Clare: The Living Year brings this material together for the first time. Here it is possible to trace the evolution of Clare’s imagination as the year unfolded. Both the depth and the range of his creative engagement become apparent, as he explores
fundamental issues of human identity and experience, in modes As different as satire and elegy, autobiography and song. The result is a compelling account of Clare’s perceptions as he responded to a momentous year in his life.

Tim Chilcott has written full length studies of Clare’s work, and of Clare’s first publisher John Taylor. He has retired as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College, Chichester.

The Anglo-Welsh poet John Dyer (1699-1757) is one of the great restless, enquiring figures of eighteenth-century British culture. A painter as well as a poet, he was a member of the talented Aaron Hill circle, and is sometimes described as the ‘godfather’ of the picturesque movement. His most famous poem Grongar Hill (1726), lovingly describes the Carmarthenshire landscape of his youth. After training as a painter under Jonathan Richardson in London, Dyer visited Italy, and went on to become a travelling painter in the Welsh-English border counties. He was later a working farmer, before serving as a parish priest in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. The major poem of his middle years, The Ruins of Rome (1740), marks an important moment in the history of attitudes to classical civilization. Dyer’s last great poem, The Fleece (1757), an epic account of the textile industry, is the high point of the English georgic tradition of agricultural poetry. The recent rediscoveries of Dyer’s notebooks and paintings, and the restoration of his birthplace and its gardens at Aberglasney, have sparked fresh interest in Dyer. This edition, marking the tercentenary of his birth, is the first new selection of his writings since 1930, and the fullest ever printed. It includes all Dyer’s shorter poems, substantial extracts from The Ruins of Rome and The Fleece, verse fragments and plans and a selection of letters and prose.

John Goodridge is a Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University.

Randall Swingler (1909-67) is the missing lyric poet of the 1930s and 1940s. Poet, playwright, novelist, editor and critic, his words set to music by distinguished composers of his generation, nephew and godson of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Swingler was the best-known poet active in the British Communist Party. In the 1930s he wrote for the Group Theatre, Unity Theatre and Workers Musical Association. He edited the Left Book Club's The Left Song Book, the books page of the Daily Worker, and Left Review (publishing the famous 'Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War'). He wrote the chorale finale to Alan Bush's Piano Concerto No. 1, and (with Auden) the libretto for Britten's Ballad of Heroes. During World War Two, Swingler served with the Eighth Army in Africa and Italy (including Anzio and Salerno) and was awarded the Military Medal for bravery. After the War, he edited the radical Fitzrovian magazines, Our Time, Arena and Circus and was on the editorial board of the New Reasoner.

Swingler's poetry provides a unique record of his times, from the romantic Communism of the early thirties and the campaigning years of the Popular Front, through the war in Italy and the anti-Fascist victory of 1945 to the disappointed hopes of Cold War Europe. Bringing together his poetry for the first time, Selected Poems is an introduction to the work of an undeservedly-forgotten figure and a challenge to our understanding of a remarkable period of English literary history.

Andy Croft is a poet and community-writing activist in Middlesbrough. He has written and broadcast widely on the literary history of the Labour Movement, including Red Letter Days, (1990), Out of the Old Earth (1994) and A Weapon in the Struggle: the Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain (1998). He has published three books of poetry.

The satirist Charles Churchill (1731-64) published all of his poetry in a brief period between 1761 and his death three years later. His work was immensely popular from the time of his early death to the end of the eighteenth century, and his admirers included William Cowper, Thomas Chatterton, and Byron, who was influenced very clearly by his satires. Churchill's friendship with the controversial politician John Wilkes led to his help in the composition of Wilkes's journal, The North Briton (1762-3), and to a stream of satires directed against the perceived hypocrisies, excesses and inequities of the administration of John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute. Churchill also inveighed against establishment double-standards and corruption, the problems of colonialism and examples of artistic affectation, and raised larger questions about the supposed progress of civilisation. His satiric targets include Samuel Johnson, William Warburton, Thomas Gray, Tobias Smollett, William Hogarth, and James Macpherson, and his poems, a virtual record of the artistic and political scandals of his time, take up the angry legacy of the late satirical work of Alexander Pope. To read Churchill is to experience the often ferocious political world of the early 1760s and to understand how his controversial poetry remains highly relevant.

This selection of Churchill's work draws on different aspects of his career to offer a representative picture: it includes his most acclaimed and substantial poems, The Prophecy of Famine, An Epistle to William Hogarth, and the 'Dedication to the Sermons'. The text is not modernised, and the notes offer an updating of precious editions, along with much new information.

Nancy Cunard (1896- 1965) was a remarkable woman, most famous now perhaps for the vast anthology Negro (1934), which she put together with her sometime lover, the jazz pianist, Henry Crowder, and the for the pamphlet she edited in 1937, Authors Take sides on the Spanish War. A renowned beauty, she used her inherited wealth to aid various radical causes and, in 1928, to set up the Hours Press in France. Among its ealiest publications was a small collection of poems, Whorescope, by the then unknown Samuel Beckett.

Cunard published four collections of her own poems and in 1943, at the suggestion of Edward Thompson (father of the historian E.P. Thompson, and poetry editor for
the publishers Benn), she began to assemble all the verse she wished to preserve, for an intended collected edition. Thompson died in 1944 and the typescript of the poems was left among his papers. These were eventually deposited at the Bodleian, and Cunard's poems have been retrieved from this typescript by the kind permission of Dorothy Thompson, to form the text of the present edition.

First published in Boston in 1859, Our Nig, or, Sketches form the Life of a Free Black offers a harrowing portrait of the sadistic maltreatment of Alfrado, a young female African American bond servant. It shows how racism can infect the whole body politic and how enslavement can exist not just as a legally defined institution but also as an apparatus of social practices and norms, even in a slave-free State, namely Massachusetts. The novel thus shows how slavery can indeed exist in ‘freedom’.

Our Nig is a milestone in African American writing. It stands as the first published novel to be written by an African American woman and the first African American novel to be published in the USA.Limited in its circulation, Our Nig remained hardly noticed until brought back to the public’s attention in 1983, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. released a facsimile edition. Only then did it start to receive the acclaim it deserved. This is the first modern edition to be published.

R.J. Ellis is chair of the American and Canadian Studies Department at the University of Birmingham.

When first published in 1879 Hawthorne was attacked for its stress upon the provinciality of American culture and taste, which James represented as constraining Nathaniel Hawthorne. But if biography takes the form of a complex negotiation between the biographer’s self and the historical subject, then James’s treatment of Hawthorne serves as a fascinating delineation of his own literary and cultural self.

Hawthorne not only stands as an intriguing commentary by one important writer on another but also speaks tellingly about the self-conscious development of both American and modern culture. Hawthorne is famously depicted as an exquisite ‘romancer’ of ‘light and capricious’ intellect, whilst the Jamesian aesthetic self, in the form of the generous, amused, and tolerant narrative voice of Hawthorne, seeks to distance itself from his legacy, presuming its own cultural maturity.

Yet, perversely, this attempt at differentiation illuminates the anxious relationship between Hawthorne and James, and beyond, to T.S.Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and the mainstream of late American modernism. Deep ironies reside in James’s words. ‘Whatever may have been Hawthorne’s private lot, he has the importance of geing the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius’.

Kate Fulbrook, who died in 2003, was Professor of English at the University of the West of England.

In the Second Year, originally published in 1936, offers a vivid premonition of a British fascist regime only five years in the future, modelling its narrative on the events of Hitler's second year in power and his Night of the Long Knives. As much a critique of Britain in 1936 as a warning of what might still be averted by determined action, the novel is not however a political tract but an eminently readable work of fiction. Its subtle characterisation and dramatic plotting distiguish it from left-wing formula novels of the 1930s, and underpin the shrewd analysis of contemporary states of mind left, right and centre, all of which are found wanting. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the interwar years, it is also, in the sheer power of its story-telling, an enthralling novel for the general reader, meriting comparison with such dystopian fictions as Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Rex Warner's The Aerodrome. Considered by Jameson to be her best work, In the Second Year is, quite simply, a very good novel.

It is a scandal that, of the nearly seventy books written by the socialist and feminist author, Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), not one is currently in print. This reprinting of In the Second Year is long overdue, and rectifies in small part this state of affairs.

Ellen Wilkinson, the first woman Labour MP, is best remembered for leading a march of unemployed from her Jarrow constituency to London in 1936. Her first novel Clash is set a decade earlier, during the General Strike and Miners' Lock-Out of 1926. Wilkinson was sent by the TUC to tour the country in support of the strikers, and the book bears all the marks of her first-hand experience.

Clash moves skilfully between the comfortable world of the Bloomsbury artistic set and the poverty-stricken communities of the Yorkshire coalfields. The momentous events of the period are unfolded around the life of Joan Craig, a young trade union official torn between her commitment to the workers' cause and her romantic love for a man not sharing her socialist ideals. The book raises questions about the relationship between the personal and the political and the public and the private that still resonate today. This is the first critical edition of Wilkinson's novel.

First published in London by Chatto and Windus in 1936, and in New York by the Viking Press in 1937, The Croquet Player has never been subsequently reprinted.

This is astonishing, given the extent to which this novella stands as a prescient forecast of the turmoil in Europe leading up to the start of World War Two and the events that happened in the war itself: 'little children killed in air-raids in the street'.

This novella sees Wells at his brilliant best, in full narrative control of his fantastic fable.

John Hammond is founder and President of the H. G. Wells Society.

All but ignored by post-war critics, George Garrett’s stories and reportage were praised by some of the most influential writers of the 1930’s, including George Orwell, Sylvia Townsend Warner and John Lehmann. His ability to shift from realism to the symbolic has been likened to Conrad, making his work indispensable to anyone interested in the full range of British writing during the decade.

Born on Merseyside in 1896, Garret’s stories vividly record the experiences of a merchant seaman during the First World War and his return to the working-class realities of ‘a land fit for heroes.’ Also included are Garrett’s first-hand accounts of life on the breadline in twenties Liverpool, and of the 1922 Hunger March. Both display his powers as a satirist and social critic in the tradition of Defoe.

The Collected George Garrett also contains his critical ripostes to Conrad’s ‘The Nigger of the Narcissus’, and an extract from his essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The collection concludes with a previously unpublished autobiographical sketch set in the pre-1914 docklands of Liverpool.

Michael Murphy’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Critical Survey, London Magazine, Miscelania, Poetry Ireland Review and Symbiosis. His first collection poems, after Attila, is published by Shoestring Press. Michael is a Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University.

A new, witty and immensely inventive form of political propaganda appeared in London in the mid-1790s: a series of mock-advertisements and other public announcements which represented the activities of George III, of the government of William Pitt, and of the leaders of the British Army fighting the French Republic, as so many spectacles and entertainments: as plays, pantomimes, auction sales, art-exhibitions, ceremonial processions, and magic-shows.

These satires use all the design know-how and typographical high jinks of late eighteenth century street advertising, and many of them remain hilariously funny despite the passage of 200 years. They also raise some fascinating questions, about who wrote them, how they were disseminated, their audience, and the relations between 'polite' politicians and the popular radicalism in the years of the French Revolution. This book presents 26 of these satires, together with an explanatory Introduction and full commentary. Exhibition Extraordinary!! will fascinate all those interested in political history and the history of the theatre, as well as students and scholars with an interest in British culture during the French Revolution.

John Barrell is Professor of English in the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. He is the author of a number of books on eighteenth and early nineteenth century literature, art and politics, most recently Imagining the King's Death (Oxford, 2000).

Hannah More's work, neglected for much of the twentieth century, is being critically evaluated. She gave the controversial title Tales for the Common People to a selection of her Cheap Repository Tracts, first published between 1795 and 1798 and distributed across the nation to more than two million people in a remarkable cultural experiment which was politically counter-revolutionary and morally radical. Fissures in her texts reveal creative conflict as she advocates the values of the prevailing ideology while seeking to modify them.
These simple but influential texts deserve reading by students of women's writing, social historians and anyone interested in methods of converting minds by the use of fiction. The present edition draws on the early chapbook versions of these tracts, printing some with their original woodcuts.

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Clare MacDonald Shaw, formerly a Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University.

Writers and poets are often strongly drawn to John Clare (1793-1864), the greatest poet of English rural life. Ronald Blythe's love for Clare began when a friend introduced him to Sidney Keyes's 1941 verse-tribute to Clare, and blossomed when he was invited to be the President of the newly formed John Clare Society. His talks about Clare are gathered together for the first time here. Written over three decades, they offer a unique contibution to the study of Clare and his tradition, tracing the qualities that have drawn writers and readers to Clare, and considering Clare's place in the changing rural world.

Ronald Blythe is the President of the John Clare Society, and one of our most eminent rural writers. His famous account of a Suffolk village, Akenfield, has recently been re-issued by Penquin as a Twentieth Century Classic.

His most recent publications are a book of essays, Going to See George and Other Outings (Long Barn Books, 1999); First Friends (Viking Penquin, 1999), a study of the young Paul and John Nash and Dora Carrington and their relationships in the period 1910-1920; and Out of the Valley (Viking Penquin, 2000), a journal in the style of Word from Wormingford.

 
Saving From The Wreck: Essays on Poetry brings together a number of Peter Porter's critical essays on poetry. The essays, which started life as lectures, addresses, or in one instance a radio talk, range in subject matter from the Earl of Rochester through Pope, Christopher Smart, George Crabbe and Robert Browning to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, and from meditations on poetry and music to the difficulties and rewards of translation. They are witty, deeply informed, fluently conversational and, as is to be expected, of unfailing interest to those concerned with the craft of poetry.

Peter Porter has been described as 'one of the few poets equal to our serious times'. When his two-volume Collected Poems was published in 1999 it was widely hailed as demonstrating beyond doubt Porter's right to be considered as among the finest of contemporary poets.

With an introduction by John Lucas.

 
Starting To Explain: Essays on Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry brings together work produced over the past twenty years by a critic whom Terry Eagleton described in The Independent On Sunday as possessing 'a quick, erudite sense of English social history', and whose writing on modern poets has been praised in the New Statesman for its 'alert commitment to the craft of poetry'.

Starting to Explain begins with a consideration of Hardy's Wessex Poems and ends with an essay on contemporary anthologies. In between come extended essays on poets D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, edgell Rickword, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Roy Fuller, W.S. Graham, Philip Larkin, Roy Fisher, Seamus Heaney and others, alongside more general pieces on such subjects as poetry and politics and poetry and jazz.

John Lucas, emeritus Professor of English at The Nottingham Trent University, is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems, and of numerous works of criticism and literary scholarship. Since 1994 he has been publisher of Shoestring Press.