A History of British, Irish and American Literature: Third revised and enlarged edition
About this ebook
The feature that makes this literary history unique among its rivals is the coverage of television/web series as a particular form of postmodern drama. The chapters on recent drama now contain detailed analyses of the development of TV and web series from Britain, Ireland and America, with extensive discussions of those series now considered classics.
In addition, there are several major innovative features. To begin with, each century is introduced by a survey of the socio-political and cultural backgrounds in which the literary works are embedded. Furthermore, extensive visual material (more than 160 engravings, cartoons and paintings) has been integrated. This visual aspect as well as the introductory sections on art for each century give the reader an excellent idea of the symbiosis between visual and literary representations.
Further innovative aspects include
- discussions of non-fictional works from literary criticism and theory, travel writing, historiography, and the social sciences
- analyses of such popular genres as crime fiction, science fiction, fantasy, the Western, horror fiction, and children’s literature
- footnotes explaining technical and historical terms and events
- a detailed glossary of literary terms
- chronological tables for British/Anglo-Irish and American literatures an updated (cut-off date 2020), extensive bibliography containing suggestions for further reading
About the author
Hans-Peter Wagner is Professor emeritus of English and American Literature and former Dean of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences at the Landau campus of Universität Koblenz-Landau. He has taught at German, British, American, African and Asian universities. His academic honours include a fellowship at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (1990), Distinguished Visiting Professorships at Dartmouth College, Pitzer College and Université Paris 7-Diderot. In 2017, he was also awarded a Herder Professorship by the DAAD. The editor of several English novels in the Penguin Classics series and of two Studies Series published by WVT Trier (TESBA and TESMA), he has published 30 books and 80 scholarly articles on a wide variety of subjects: colonial American culture, Enlightenment art and literature, postmodern American literature, the graphic art of William Hogarth, text-image relations, and American TV series.