Trent Editions E-Books

Framed with postcards from other writers and expert introductions, the collection reflects on the challenges of the twenty-first century moment. The book emerges from the innovative Re:Vision programme developed by the Critical Poetics research group at Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with the UNESCO Creative Cities network.Writing the Contemporary brings together the work of three European poets to explore themes of home, technology and environment.

Edited with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Edwards.

Richard Llwyd (1752-1835), a domestic servant turned poet and antiquarian, became one of Wales's best-known Romantic-period writers on the publication of 'Beaumaris Bay: A Poem' in 1800. Today almost forgotten, Llwyd was celebrated in his own time as the 'Bard of Snowdon', a poet whose depiction of North Wales's landscapes, literature and history came to define those spaces for later travellers to the region.

The Northamptonshire poet John Clare (1793-1864) knew and named more than 400 plant species in his poetry and prose, an 'astonishing tally', as Molly Mahood points out in her study of 'The Poet as Botanist'. Nor are these merely incidental mentions. Clare has been granted the very impressive total of more than 40 first county records for plants, as well as 65 for birds.

Gregory Woods is Emeritus Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. Best known for his literary criticism, Gregory Woods now turns his attention to journalism, film, TV, shopping, popular fiction, cartoons, the memoirs of the Beirut hostages, desert island stories, travel brochures, Italian camp, and anything else that takes his fancy.

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962) was a working-class writer and socialist activist who fought to campaign for social and economic justice and the rights of working women.

The Political Writings of William Fox (2011) by William Fox, edited by John Barrell and Timothy Whelan.

William Fox’s writings have been neglected by historians of the 1790s because, as both a Tory and a strong supporter of the French republic, he does not fit into a version of the period based on the simple opposition of Whigs and Tories. or of followers of Burke or Paine, and also because, until now, his identity has been a complete mystery.

The shipwreck narrative was a popular and prolific, if now largely forgotten, branch of Romantic-era print culture. Yet there are many fascinating and deeply moving accounts to be found in this voluminous literature. Just as importantly, the genre also offers a wealth of insights into a broad range of current academic debates. For a nation like Britain where military and economic power and even cultural identity were predicated on maritime prowess, shipwrecks were profoundly troubling events.

Selected Poems by Robert Bloomfield (Revised and enlarged), edited by Professor John Goodridge and Professor John Lucas.

Robert Bloomfield, the author of six volumes of poetry, a play, and a children's book, was the most successful of the self-taught "peasant poets" of the Romantic period. This edition is the first scholarly edition of his work and includes a selection of Bloomfield's prose prefaces and explanatory notes, a chronology of his life, and a list of further reading. This edition is true to Bloomfield's autobiographical manuscript at Harvard University.

Trent Essays is an occasional series of commissioned volumes in which key practitioners write critically on aspects of creative writing and on other writers and their works. In A Writer’s Day-Book Ronald Blythe, the eminent author of Akenfield, Divine Landscapes and many other notable titles, offers a lively selection from the ‘day-book’ of his reading and writing life, focusing on a wide range of writers who have inspired him, from Thomas Traherne to Virginia Woolf, Laurie Lee to Russell Hoban.

Harris’ Requiem (2006) By Stanley Middleton. Edited with an introduction by David Belbin, with the author's cooperation.
Thomas Harris is on the cusp of great success as a classical composer. But for every success he gets a knock back. This gripping, superbly crafted novel portrays the classical music world of the late fifties. It is Stanley Middleton’s second novel and his personal favourite.

Poems of Nancy Cunard (2005), edited with an Introduction by John Lucas.
Cunard published four collections of her own poems and in 1943, at the suggestion of Edward Thompson (father of the historian E.P Thompson, and poetry editor for the publishers Benn), she began to assemble all the verse she wished to preserve, for an intended edition. Thompson died in 1944 and the typescript of the poems was left among his papers.

Scripture Women (2005) By Rose Thurgood and Cicely Johnson. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Naomi Baker. The introduction to the texts outlines the historical and cultural background of the women and their works, including a discussion of the relationship between the authors' social positions and the identities that they construct in their narratives.

Selections from ‘Bengaliana’ By Shoshee Chunder Dutt.
One of the earliest Indian authors to publish fiction in English, Shoshee Chunder Dutt was a prolific essayist, poet, historian and novelist, and a perceptive social commentator. A member of the gifted Dutt family of Calcutta, his writing is a fascinating window on the colonial ‘contact zone’ of the early nineteenth century.

Selected Writings of a Pioneer West African Feminist (2004) By Mabel Dove.
This book brings together for the first time an extensive selection of Mabel Dove’s journalistic and creative writing – work originally published in West African newspapers between 1931 and 1966. Mabel Dove (1905 – 1984) was one of the few female writers – and one of the first feminist thinkers – to produce newspaper articles on a regular basis in Ghana.

Starting to Explain: Essays on Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry brings together work produced over the past twenty years. It begins with a consideration of Hardy’s Wessex Poems and ends with an essay on contemporary anthropologies. In between some extended essays on poets D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Edgell Rickword, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Roy Fuller, W.S. Graham, Philip Lark, Roy Fisher, Seamus Heaney, alongside more general pieces on such subjects as poetry and politics and jazz.

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Christopher Gair. The first edition of this text was published in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. Most reprints of the novel have followed the revised 1896 text, yet Crane made a number of cuts and changes for this later edition. Most significantly, he deleted much of a paragraph describing a menacing encounter Maggie has just before her death. Once this cut is restored, the implications of her death are substantially altered, a shift above all marked by a fundamental adjustment to the gender politics of the book.

John Clare (1793-1864) holds a unique position in our literary culture as the greatest poet of English rural life, and a figure to whom other writers and poets are strongly drawn. Spanning three decades, this collection of Ronald Blythe's work (writer and former president of the John Clare Society) on John Clare offers a unique contribution to the study of Clare by examining the qualities that have drawn writers and readers to Clare, and considering Clare’s place in the changing rural world.

Our Nig (1998) by Harriet E. Wilson. Edited, with an introduction and notes by R. J. Ellis. First published in Boston in 1859, Our Nig, or, Sketches form the Life of a Free Black offers a harrowing portrait of the sadistic maltreatment of Alfrado, a young female African American bond servant. It shows how racism can infect the whole body politic and how enslavement can exist not just as a legally defined institution but also as an apparatus of social practices and norms, even in a slave-free State, namely Massachusetts. The novel thus shows how slavery can indeed exist in ‘freedom’.

The Croquet Player (1998) By H.G Wells
Edited, with an introduction and notes, by John Hammond