Dickens redressed

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Niall Rudd

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace) died on 27 November, 8 B.C. This volume provides a fitting tribute to one who was both Rome's greatest lyric poet and its most engaging moralist. Horace 2000: A Celebration contains chapters from seven established scholars, each representing a major aspect of Horace's work. Because of their different backgrounds - in politics, literary criticism, and cultural history - the writers adopt different approaches to his poetry. They occasionally disagree, but they all have something thought-provoking and significant to say. The volume also includes a Latin poem in praise of Horace.

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Gwyn Jones

These twelve essays and addresses range widely from consideration of the nature of Anglo-Welsh literature to incisive commentary on critical approaches to the European novel. Authors such as Dylan Thomas, Richard Savage, and Caradoc Evans ('the best-hated Welshman of them all') come under the author's sympathetic scrutiny; there is a trenchant analysis of the Heroic poetry of the Welsh, Norse, and English peoples. Here too are some reflections on Viking themes, an area in which Gwyn Jones has established a world-wide reputation. Gwyn Jones's critical insights and literary judgements are constantly enlivened by his genial personality and a gift for vivid description, expressed in prose that is at once thoughtful and unsolemn. These explorations are the witty and lively writings of a man whose heart is in Wales, but whose head allows him to range freely across the wider world.

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Kole Omotoso

This is a controversial new study on Africa's two most widely read and, arguably, her finest writers. Despite their shared levels of prestige, each represents a distinct pole of Nigerian writing. On the one hand, there's Soyinka, the playful imagist steeped in the myth and magic of his native Yoruba culture; at the other end of the spectrum, Achebe's internalized Igbo cultural traditions. Kole Omotoso - himself a prolific writer and prize-winning Nigerian novelist - explores and defines the differences in style, background, and vision between the two men. Individual chapters describe their childhood, their cultural influences, political involvement, their stand during the Nigerian civil war, their attitudes to the world at large, their contribution to the language debate in African literatures, and there is also a chapter devoted to Achebe's and Soyinka's responses to their critics. The works of Achebe and Soyinka are considered against three main agendas: the pan-African agenda, the Nigerian nation-state agenda, and the ethnic national agenda. Despite their shared nationality, their contribution towards creating 'a community of sensibilities' in Nigeria is questioned by the author in terms of the instability that has bedevilled Nigeria and, by extension, other African countries.

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Simon Reynolds

Despite having rejuvenated rock, by the summer of 1977 punk had become a parody of itself. This book looks at what happened next, with the emergence of post-punk bands such as PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Fall and The Human League -- Global books in print.