Literary Criticism

The ghost story 1840-1920: A cultural history examines the British ghost story within the political contexts of the long nineteenth century. By relating the ghost story to economic, national, colonial and gendered contexts, it provides a critical...

* In size, price, and elegant packaging, these books will make ideal gifts * Beautiful 3-colour jacket designed to give a uniform look * Unique and highly distinctive black-and-white pattern on each spine * Full-cloth, flexible covers * Sewn bindings *...

The late Tony Tanner was one of the most distinctive and distinguished critical voices on American literature. His work is familiar to generations of students and scholars, and has helped shape our understanding of the major nineteenth and twentieth...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780993218316Author David WheelerFormat PaperbackPage Count 148Imprint Red Axe BooksPublisher Red Axe BooksWeight(grams) 209gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

The Companion to Romanticism is a major introductory survey from an international galaxy of scholars writing new pieces, specifically for a student readership, under the editorship of Duncan Wu.About the AuthorDuncan Wu is Professor of English...

J.R.R Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is not only a seemingly inexhaustible source of wonder and excitement, it is also a profound tale, relevant to our times and to the vital question: what is it to be a human being? Why have these books proved so...

To speak of 'thinking with literature' is to make the assumption that literature (in the broadest sense) is neither a side-show nor a side-issue in human cultures: it belongs to the spectrum of imaginative modes that includes both philosophical and...

'Like all good diarists Paling's musings are funny, tender and uncensored' Sunday Times6 April 2007Writing income for the year so far: minus GBP300'I feel that this might just be the year in which something happens. Then again it might not. But hope...

'An extraordinary book of real passionate research' Edmund de WaalIn 1945, Ezra Pound was due to stand trial for treason for his broadcasts in Fascist Italy during the Second World War. But before the trial could take place Pound was pronounced insane...

A brilliant - and rather transgressive - collection of short stories from the double Man Booker Prize-winning author of Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light. Including a new story 'The School of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910170892Author John BairdFormat PaperbackPage Count 480Imprint Five Leaves PublicationsPublisher Five Leaves Publications

For students of modern literature, the works of Virginia Woolf are essential reading. In her novels, short stories, essays, polemical pamphlets and in her private letters she explored, questioned and refashioned everything about modern life: cinema,...

This third and final volume of A. David Moody's critical life of Ezra Pound presents Pound's personal tragedy in a tragic time. In this volume, we experience the 1939-1945 World War, and Pound's hubristic involvement in Fascist Italy's part in it; we...

Writing Philosophy: A Student's Guide to Writing Philosophy Essays is a concise, self-guided manual that covers the basics of argumentative essay writing and encourages students to master fundamental skills quickly, with minimal instructor input. Opening...

The author here reassesses the concept of 'masculinity', and argues that it cannot be seen as an absolute standard, but only as the product of perpetual conflict between competing and unstable models. The argument is sustained by a close reading of the...

Mysterious, esoteric, baffling - John Ashbery is notorious for the seeming difficulty of his work. But Ashbery is also entertaining, humorous and charming, and responsive to his shifting social and political contexts. This biography charts his emergence...

The last thirty years have witnessed one of the most fertile periods in the history of children's books: the flowering of imaginative illustration and writing, the Harry Potter phenomenon, the rise of young adult and crossover fiction, and books that...

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781949597271Author Geoffrey O'brienFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Terra Nova PressPublisher Terra Nova Press

Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum Dance - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry - are hymns to the tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic...

This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from 'The Remains...

Wordsworth's lines on Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) contributed to a legend that became better known than Chatterton's work itself. His story is moving: a sensitive, unhappy boy, he fell in love with the medieval world and escaped into it from miserable...

The master of Old Comedy.Aristophanes of Athens, one of the world's greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and...

FOREWORD BY ALI SMITH WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADE Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf? ...

The poetry of the Great War is among the most powerful ever written in the English language. Unique for its immediacy and searing honesty, it has made a fundamental contribution to our understanding of and response to war and the suffering it creates...

Thomas Hardy's fiction has had a remarkably strong appeal for general readers for decades, and his poetry has been acclaimed as among the most influential of the twentieth century. His work still creates passionate advocacy and opposition. The Cambridge...

When actors perform Shakespeare, what do they do with their bodies? How do they display to the spectator what is hidden in the imagination? This is a history of Shakespearean performance as seen through the actor's body. Tunstall draws upon social,...

As the US becomes a second-place nation, can it shed the superpower nostalgia that still haunts the UK? The debate over the US's fading hegemony has raged and sputtered for 50 years, glutting the market with prophecies about American decline. Media...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780140044362Author Ruth SawyerFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Penguin Random House AustraliaPublisher Penguin Random House AustraliaWeight(grams)...

In 1938 Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume that would remain in print for more than fifty years. For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general readers to keep Jeffers-in spite of the almost total academic...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781501180699Author Jamie MortonFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Gallery BooksPublisher Gallery BooksWeight(grams) 340gDimensions(mm) 185mm * 152mm * 18mm

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781614983934Author S T JoshiFormat PaperbackPage Count 262Imprint Hippocampus PressPublisher Hippocampus PressWeight(grams) 263gDimensions(mm) 203mm * 127mm...

Ovid was one of the greatest writers of classical antiquity, and arguably the single most influential ancient poet for post-classical literature and culture. In this Cambridge Companion, chapters by leading authorities from Europe and North America...

This is the new edition of bestselling introductory text outlining the history and ways of reading Gothic literature. This revised edition includes a new chapter on Contemporary Gothic which explores the Gothic of the early twentieth century and looks at...

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been...

Blasted brought Sarah Kane to the theatre pages of the broadsheets, the front pages of the tabloids, and to the notice of the nation. Covers all Kane's major plays and productions, contains hitherto unpublished material and reviews, and looks at her...

Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic...

'In our era, criticism is not merely a library of secondary aids to the understanding and appreciation of literary texts, but also a rapidly expanding body of knowledge in its own right.' David LodgeThis anthology uses extracts from the works of the...

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at...

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.About the AuthorPeter Brooks is...