Secondhand Literary Studies & Australian Writing Bargain Book Box SP2693

The star of this box is hiding in plain sight: all seven volumes of Boris Ford's landmark Pelican Guide to English Literature, the series that shaped how English literature was taught in universities and schools across the English-speaking world for a generation. Alongside them sits a complementary cluster of Australian literary anthologies and criticism — short fiction from the colonial era to the present, profiles of the writers who built the national literature, and two important story collections. An ideal box for teachers, students, or any serious reader with a shelf devoted to how literature works and where it comes from.

1. David Cecil — Early Victorian Novelists (Fontana Library) Lord David Cecil was one of Oxford's great literary critics — elegant, humane, and deeply readable. This survey of Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, Trollope, and George Eliot remains a classic introduction to the novelists who defined the Victorian age.
2. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 1: The Age of Chaucer The opening volume of one of the most influential works of popular literary scholarship ever published. Ford and his contributors set out to make serious criticism available to every reader — and largely succeeded. Beginning with Chaucer and the medieval tradition, this is where English literature starts.
3. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 2: The Age of Shakespeare The Elizabethan and Jacobean flowering — Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, and the extraordinary concentration of genius that produced the English dramatic tradition. One of the richest volumes in the series.
4. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 3: From Donne to Marvell The seventeenth century in full: metaphysical poetry, Milton, the Civil War and its literary aftermath, and the traditions that would feed directly into the Augustan age that followed.
5. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 4: From Dryden to Johnson The Augustan age — Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Johnson himself — the age that established prose as the dominant literary mode and shaped the novel into the form we still recognise.
6. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 5: From Blake to Byron The Romantic revolution: Blake's prophetic fury, Wordsworth and Coleridge reinventing what poetry could do, Keats and Shelley burning briefly and brilliantly, Byron standing magnificently apart from all of them.
7. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 6: From Dickens to Hardy Victorian literature at full stretch — Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy, Tennyson, Browning, and the emergence of the novel as the central cultural form of the modern world.
8. Boris Ford (ed.) — The Pelican Guide to English Literature 7: The Modern Age The final volume brings the series into the twentieth century — Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Yeats, Auden — and provides the critical framework for understanding how the modern tradition broke from and continued everything that preceded it. All seven volumes together form a remarkable and still useful set.
9. John Hetherington — Forty-Two Faces: Profiles of Living Australian Writers Hetherington was one of Australia's great literary journalists, and these profiles of the writers working at the midpoint of the twentieth century constitute an invaluable historical record of Australian literary culture — many of the figures captured here have since passed into the canon, others into obscurity.
10. Cecil Hadgraft (ed.) — The Australian Short Story Before Lawson Hadgraft, Professor of Australian Literature at Queensland, rescues the tradition of Australian short fiction that predates Henry Lawson's dominance — recovering the colonial voices that laid the ground for what followed.
11. L.J. Blake — Australian Writers A useful survey of Australian literary figures and their work — a reference volume that maps the terrain of the national literature with a teacher's clarity and purpose.
12. Jim Haynes (ed.) — The Best Australian Bush Stories Haynes has done as much as anyone to preserve and celebrate the Australian bush storytelling tradition — this anthology gathers the finest examples of a distinctly Australian literary form, from the campfire yarn to the polished short story.
13. George Papaellinas (ed.) — Harbour: Stories by Australian Writers (Picador) A quality Picador anthology gathering some of the strongest short fiction by Australian writers of the 1980s and 90s — a snapshot of the national literature at a moment of considerable creative energy.
14. Enter... — HQ/Flamingo Short Story Collection (Flamingo) Twenty-five new short stories drawn from the HQ/Flamingo competition — a fascinating time capsule of emerging Australian and international fiction voices, and a reminder of the important role literary magazines played in discovering new writers.