Henry Power is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. He has been awarded a research fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to allow him to work on this book. As well as publishing academic books, he is a regular contributor to publications such as the TLS, Evening Standard and Literary Review. He has appeared as a guest on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4. He has a significant international profile as an academic, and has held visiting posts at All Souls College, Oxford; Yale University; the Huntington Library, California, and Peking University, Beijing.