In the mid-1980s, just as the new historicists, with their invocation of "the historicity of texts and the textuality of history," were transforming the way readers understood the English Renaissance, Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose became both a critical success and a bestseller. (1983) Widely celebrated as a postmodern historical novel, this dazzling mixture of thick historical research and popular detective fiction invited its readers to view historical fiction as an academically respectable genre and a vehicle for recovering and reimagining the past in unconventional ways...

• Word Count: 4697
• Approx Pages: 19
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Poetry to 1945 Queen Victoria died in 1901, but most of the certainties of the Victorian age had disappeared long before. ... This was apparent in the poetry of the 1890s – the decade of Aestheticism and Decadence. It was largely a poetry of urban themes; the Romantic dependence on nature had already declined. ... Above all, poetry was not statement or felt sensation, but 'art'. ... Yeats himself quickly drew the lesson that 'We must purify poetry', which was to continue, through movements like Imagism and Vorticism, up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the ...

• Word Count: 10566
• Approx Pages: 42