Literary Criticism

Addressed to readers of modern literature as well as to those interested in Greco-Roman literature and in religious history, Auctor and Actor examines Apuleius's The Golden Ass as an early example of self-consciousness in narrative. Entering into the...

Christina Rossetti (1830-94) is regarded as one of the greatest Christian poets to write in English. While Rossetti has firmly secured her place in the canon, her religious poetry was for a long time either overlooked or considered evidence of a...

Homer's mythological tales of war and homecoming, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are considered to be two of the most influential works in the history of Western literature. Yet their author, 'the greatest poet that ever lived' is something of a mystery. By...

Frederick Klaeber's Beowulf has long been the standard edition for study by students and advanced scholars alike. Its wide-ranging coverage of scholarship, its comprehensive philological aids, and its exceptionally thorough notes and glossary have...

What we can learn about caregiving and community from the Victorian novelIn Communities of Care, Talia Schaffer explores Victorian fictional representations of care communities, small voluntary groups that coalesce around someone in need. Drawing lessons...

Same-Sex Love in India presents a stunning array of writings on same-sex love from over 2000 years of Indian literature. Translated from more than a dozen languages and drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, and modern fictional traditions, these writings...

In Books 6 and 7 Thucydides' narrative is, as Plutarch puts it, 'at its most emotional, vivid, and varied' as he describes the Sicilian Expedition that ended so catastrophically for Athens (415-413 BCE). Book 7 opens with Athens seemingly on the point of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781906841225Author Linden BicketFormat PaperbackPage Count 82Imprint Association for Scottish Literary StudiesPublisher Association for Scottish Literary...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DIRECTOR JANE CAMPIONJohn Keats died in penury and relative obscurity in 1821, aged only 25. He is now seen as one of the greatest English poets and a genius of the Romantic age. This collection, which contains all his most...

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers-Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle-crossed in South Africa, during what's become known as Britain's last imperial war. Each of the three had pressing personal reasons to leave England...

This book gives a radically new reading of Russia's cultural history. Alexander Etkind traces how the Russian Empire conquered foreign territories and domesticated its own heartlands, thereby colonizing many peoples, Russians included. This vision of...

In The Value of Herman Melville, Geoffrey Sanborn presents Melville to us neither as a somber purveyor of dark truths nor as an ironist who has outthought us in advance but as a quasi-maternal provider, a writer who wants more than anything else to...

Hayden White is celebrated as one of the great minds in the humanities. Since the publication of his groundbreaking monograph, Metahistory, in 1973, White's work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history,...

In the summer of 1816 paparazzi trained their telescopes on Byron and the Shelleys across Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley babysat and wrote Frankenstein. Byron dieted and penned The Prisoner of Chillon. His doctor, Polidori, was dreaming up The Vampyre...

Can you imagine what today's technology would have looked like in the Victorian Era? That's the world Steampunk envisions: a mad-inventor collection of 21st Century-inspired contraptions powered by stream and driven by gears. It's more than just a...

An accessible introduction to cultural theory and an original polemic about the purpose of criticism. What is criticism for? Over the past few decades, impassioned disagreements over that question in the academy have burst into the news media. These...

Every great civilisation from the Bronze Age to the present day has produced epic poems. Epic poetry has always had a profound influence on other literary genres, including its own parody in the form of mock-epic. This Companion surveys over four...

The Cambridge Companion to Proust, first published in 2001, aims to provide a broad account of the major features of Marcel Proust's great work A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-27). The specially commissioned essays, by acknowledged experts on Proust,...

The term "network" is now applied to everything from the Internet to terrorist-cell systems. But the word's ubiquity has also made it a cliche, a concept at once recognizable yet hard to explain. Network Aesthetics, in exploring how popular culture...

"The best (and the best written) book about Austen that has appeared in the last three decades."-Nina Auerbach, Journal of English and Germanic Philology"By looking at the ways in which Austen domesticates the gothic in Northanger Abbey, examines the...

Aristotle's doctrines are basic to every critical discussion of Greek tragedy and of other literary forms. Although the Poetics has often been denounced or rejected, such rejection is usually the result of a misunderstanding of what Aristotle says. And...

These first two volumes of a projected five, in preparation for several years, begin a major publishing venture, collecting the complete essays of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. The first two volumes span...

First published in 1984, Paul Muldoon's The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry sought to establish a canon of Irish Poetry since the death of Yeats. Here the reader can explore substantial selections of the poetry of ten of the most consistently...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780140446890Author Christine de PizanFormat PaperbackPage Count 336Imprint Penguin ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 249gDimensions(mm)...

'What is honour? A word. What is in that word 'honour'? What is that 'honour'? Air.' A history play that combines a coming-of-age narrative with a tale of power, rebellion, friendship, and betrayal, Henry IV, Part I has been a perennial favourite from...

When Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses...

Although the Victorians were awash in texts, the Bible was such a pervasive and dominant presence that they may fittingly be thought of as 'a people of one book'. They habitually read the Bible, quoted it, adopted its phraseology as their own, thought in...

The Dutch Courtesan is a riotous tragicomedy that explores the delights and perils afforded by Jacobean London. While Freevill, an educated young Englishman and the play's nominal hero, frolics in the city's streets, taverns and brothels, Franceschina,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780915924608Author Ron PadgettFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Teachers & Writers CollaborativePublisher Teachers & Writers CollaborativeWeight(grams)...

Hannah Arendt's 1958 The Human Condition was an impassioned philosophical reconsideration of the goals of being human. In its arguments about the kind of lives we should lead and the political engagement we should strive for, Arendt's interpretative...

Like Carl Darling Buck's Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), this book is an explanation of the similarities and differences between Greek and Latin morphology and lexicon through an account of their prehistory. It also aims to discuss the...

The commedia dell'arte was an improvised drama performed by masked players. How did the actors react to these demands and limitations? What force kept this form of theatre alive for more than two centuries and made Harlequin such a potent image? In this...

Of all the products of the Industrial Revolution, none left its mark on the landscape of Britain, or changed the lives of the British people, more than the railway. The encyclopedic Oxford Companion to British Railway History reveals, for the first time,...

This new take on Queer Theory explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts. The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical...

"The most consistent of all series in terms of language control, length, and quality of story." David R. Hill, Director of the Edinburgh Project on Extensive Reading.You're a brave man, but I am afraid for you,' says Lady Marian...

Wenzel presents the history of the concept of acedia, of spiritual sloth,"" from its origins among the Egyptian desert monks through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The investigation proceeds in chronological order and pays close attention...

Presenting engaging, thought-provoking stories across centuries of military activity, this book demonstrates just how extensively Shakespeare's cultural capital has been deployed at times of national conflict. Drawing upon scholarly expertise in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781035852550Author Andrew JohnFormat PaperbackPage Count 172Imprint Austin Macauley PublishersPublisher Austin Macauley Publishers

Enigmatic - mysterious - intriguing: George Mackay Brown was a notoriously private man. He rarely left his native Orkney, and yet became one of the 20th century's finest poets and prose stylists. In his prolific writings, George Mackay Brown's...

Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this...