Studies in English Literature

Edward Arnold & Co. (London, UK)
Series dates: 1961-1990
Size: 5″ x 7.5″

Edward Arnold’s Studies in English Literature series featured brief “studies of individual plays, novels and groups of poems and essays, which are known to be widely studied in Sixth Forms and in universities. The emphasis is on clarification and evaluation; biographical and historical facts, while they may of course be referred to as helpful to an understanding of particular elements in a writer’s work, will be subordinated to critical discussion.” (from the general introduction to the series).

The titles were first issued in 1961, with between 1 and 8 titles published each year (except 1980, with no new titles published) until the last title, the 76th in the series, in 1983. Reprints appear through 1990. Only one title (#16: Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing) was published out of chronological order. Paperback versions of the series were issued from the beginning, in 1961.

1961
1. Milton, Comus and Samson Agonistes
2. Pope, The Rape of the Lock
3. Jane Austen, Emma
4. W. B. Yeats, The Poems

1962
5. Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale and The Clerk’s Tale
6. Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
7. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

1963
8. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi
9. Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
10. Wordsworth, The Prelude and Other Poems
11. George Eliot, Middlemarch
12. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
13. Shakespeare, Hamlet
14. Shakespeare, Macbeth
15. Shakespeare, King Lear

1964
*16: out of order (see below: Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing)
17. Donne, Songs and Sonnets
18. Marvell, Poems
19. Dickens, Great Expectations
20. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
21. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
22. Tennyson, In Memoriam
23. Fielding, Tom Jones

1965
*16. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
24. Shakespeare, Henry IV
25. Shakespeare, As You Like It

1966
26. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
27. John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
28. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers

1967
29. Dickens, Little Dorrit
30. E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
31. Shakespeare, Richard II
32. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

1968
33. Gissing, New Grub Street
34. Blake, The Lyric Poetry
35. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
36. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
37. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
38. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

1969
39. Shakespeare, The Tempest
40. Conrad, Nostromo

1970
41. Tennyson, The Early Poems
42. Golding, Lord of the Flies
43. Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles

1971
44. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
45. Webster, The White Devil
46. Lawrence, The Rainbow
47. Shakespeare, Othello
48. Virginia Woolf , To the Lighthouse

1972
49. Pope, The Dunciad
50. James Joyce, Ulysses

1973
51. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
52. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
53. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poems

1974
54. Dickens, Bleak House

1975
55. Richardson, Clarissa
56. Wordsworth and Coleridge, The Lyrical Ballads
57. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

1976
58. Shakespeare, Coriolanus
59. Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
60. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
61. Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
62. Patrick White, Voss
63. Huxley, Brave New World & Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
64. Poetry of the First World War

1977
65. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
66. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
67. Dickens, David Copperfield
68. Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy
69. Melville, Moby Dick

1978
70. Beowulf

1979
71. Shakespeare, Richard III
72. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

1981
73. Congreve: The Way of the World

1982
74. Thackeray, Vanity Fair
75. Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes & Rasselas

1983
76. Milton, Paradise Lost

Series list modified from Publishing History

John Russel Brown’s Shakespeare: The Tempest was first published in the series in 1969. Jackets and bindings for hardcover copies of the series did not vary through its three decades. An abstract graphical pattern in shades of green dominates the spine and jacket front. The artwork was “photographed from Rosebank fabric” according to a note at the bottom of the front jacket flap. The series name and series number are at the top of the front of the jacket. The author, title, and author of the volume are included on the jacket front. A list of titles in the series spans the front and rear jacket flap. A sticker with a 70p price covers the original price printed on the jacket flap.

The fabric pattern from the front of the jacket continues on the back. Titles up to #40 (first published in 1969) are listed, as is an ISBN and “Printed in Great Britain” indication.

Green cloth bindings with gold typography.

The half-title page includes the series name, series number and general editor (David Daiches).

The title page:

The copyright page includes the copyright to the author, the year of publication (1969), and ISBN for the cloth and paper editions. The book was printed in Great Britain by the Camelot Press Ltd., London, and Southampton. A general preface to the series follows.