Get out, or get even? Once, in a street not very far from yours, there lived a girl called Anonymity Jones. Anonymity's life is falling apart. Her father has left to have a mid-life crisis, her mother's new boyfriend is a definite worry, her Europe-bound sister has changed her name (just to make a point) and all her girl friends are now girlfriends, with boyfriends. And then there's the art teacher. Anonymity is losing control, and it's decision time. Does she hang on, get out, or get even?

Some of the greatest works in English literature were first published without their authors' names. Why did so many authors want to be anonymous--and what was it like to read their books without knowing for certain who had written them? In Anonymity, John Mullan gives a fascinating and original history of hidden identity in English literature. From the sixteenth century to today, he explores how the disguises of writers were first used and eventually penetrated, how anonymity teased readers and bamboozled critics--and how, when book reviews were also anonymous, reviewers played tricks of their own in return. Today we have forgotten that the first readers of Gulliver's Travels and Sense and Sensibility had to guess who their authors might be, and that writers like Sir Walter Scott and Charlotte Brontë went to elaborate lengths to keep secret their authorship of the best-selling books of their times. But, in fact, anonymity is everywhere in English literature. Spenser, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Swift, Fanny Burney, Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing--all hid their names. With great lucidity and wit, Anonymity tells the stories of these and many other writers, providing a fast-paced, entertaining, and informative tour through the history of English literature.

Academe Degree Zero brings together ten essays that identify and critically examine the key issues facing professionals in higher education today. These include the nature and limits of anonymity in academic discourse, the ways in which affiliation and prestige temper academic judgement, and the role of collegiality in academic life. Through numerous essays, edited books and journal issues, Jeffrey R. Di Leo's cross-disciplinary work has consistently been at the edge of current thinking and critical efforts to lay bare the reality of contemporary academic life. Academe Degree Zero provides a snapshot of academic identity and relations in a time of major technological and economic transformation and in the context of growing corporatisation of higher education.