Literary Criticism

Emma, perhaps the most technically accomplished of all of Austen's novels, is also, after Pride and Prejudice, her most popular one. Its numerous film and television adaptations testify to the world's enduring affection for the headstrong, often...

This is the first truly representative collection of texts by Helene Cixous. The substantial pieces range broadly across her entire oeuvre, and include essays, works of fiction, lectures and drama. Arranged helpfully in chronological order, the extracts...

This study argues against vague interpretations of fantasy as mere escapism and seeks to define it as a distinct kind of narrative. A general theoretical section introduces recent work on fantasy, notably Tzventan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural...

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to--and substantially shifts--that conversation in The Order...

'(Conrad) thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths' - Bertrand Russell This selection of four tales by...

Close reading is the most essential skill that literature students continue to develop across the full length of their studies. This book is the ideal guide to the practice, providing a methodology that can be used for poetry, novels, drama, and beyond...

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including...

'I thought you'd do what the common run of slaves normally do, cheating and tricking me because my son's having an affair.' Terence's comedies have provided plots and characters for comic drama from classical times to the present; the outstanding comic...

Ogres, giants and bogeymen embody some of our deepest fears, dominating popular storytelling in various media, from classic fairy tales such as 'Puss in Boots' to the cannibal monster Hannibal Lecter, and from Frankenstein to Men in Black. Following her...

As a study of color in the Victorian novel, this volume notices and analyzes a peculiar literary phenomenon in which Victorian authors who were also trained as artists dream up fantastically colored characters for their fiction. These strange and...

A radical look at Jane Austen as you've never seen her - as a lover of farce, comic theatre and juvenilia. The Genius of Jane Austen celebrates Britain's favourite novelist 200 years after her death and explores why her books make such...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, after two years of writing The Life of...

The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true,...

Obscure Locks, Simple Keys is a comprehensive study of this most enigmatic of all of SmauelBeckett's texts. Chris Ackerley's approach, which has some similarities to genetic editing, is based on an extensive study of the manuscripts and different...

'Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it's Oprah's Book Club worthy' Vice In London in 1958, a play by a 19-year-old redefined women's writing in Britain. It also began a movement that would change women's lives forever. The play was A...

As civilian war poetry (written under the shattering impact of World War II), Trilogys three long poems rank with T. S. Eliots Four Quartets and Ezra Pounds Pisan Cantos. The first book of the Trilogy, published in the midst of the "fifty thousand...

"One of the Year's Best," Times Literary Supplement When a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he's famous...

Quickly equips readers with the strategies to understand and deepen their engagement with individual poems Praise for the first edition: 'Wide-ranging, provocative, and thorough, Strachan and Terry provide the student with all the tools necessary for the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781906841270Author Gillian SargentFormat PaperbackPage Count 80Imprint Association for Scottish Literary StudiesPublisher Association for Scottish Literary...

This book marks a critical intervention in the medical humanities that takes issue with its understanding of empathy as something that one has.Book InformationISBN 9781474452410Author Anne WhiteheadFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Edinburgh...

This Companion examines a number of issues related to the terms realism and naturalism. The introduction seeks both to discuss the problems in the use of these two terms in relation to late nineteenth-century fiction and to describe the history of...

A master of the jeweled style.Ausonius (Decimus Magnus), ca. AD 310-ca. 395, a doctor's son, was born at Burdigala (Bordeaux). After a good education in grammar and rhetoric and a short period during which he was an advocate, he took to teaching rhetoric...

What would an anatomy of the book look like? There is the main text, of course, the file that the author proudly submits to their publisher. But around this, hemming it in on the page or enclosing it at the front and back of the book, there are dozens of...

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781558968011Author Elizabeth Jarrett AndrewFormat PaperbackPage Count 312Imprint Skinner House BooksPublisher Skinner House BooksWeight(grams) 1g

Joan of Arc has long piqued the historical imagination, for it seems impossible that a peasant-maid couldhave led the French army, crowned her king, and then been burned as a heretic, only later to be found a saint. This volume of original essays seeks...

This collection of essays covering many aspects of Austen's life, works and historical context provides the fullest introduction in one volume to the life and times of Jane Austen. Jane Austen in Context is a generously illustrated collection of short,...

Winner of the 2021 Excellence in Research and Scholarly Activity Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Finalist for the 2021 American Book Fest Best Book Awards Aging is one of the most compelling issues today, with record numbers of seniors...

First published in 1960, Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales remains the fundamental study of the distinctive techniques and aesthetics of oral epic poetry. Based upon pathbreaking fieldwork conducted in the 1930s and 1950s among oral epic singers of...

One of the oldest extant works of Western literature, the Iliad is a timeless epic poem of great warriors trapped between their own heroic pride and the arbitrary, often vicious decisions of fate and the gods. Renowned scholar and acclaimed translator...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780852446256Author I. T. KerFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint GracewingPublisher GracewingWeight(grams) 370g

Reading Poetry offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to the art of reading poetry. Discussing more than 200 poems by more than 100 writers, ranging from ancient Greece and China to the twenty-first century, the book introduces readers to the skills...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Choice Outstanding Academic Titles 2022.Book InformationISBN 9780262045834Author James C. KlaggeFormat HardbackPage Count 264Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press...

'Edward IV' (1599) was printed no less than six times up to 1626, and was one of the best loved plays of the early modern period, but this edition is the first since the 1870s. The play premiered at a moment when the representation of medieval history in...

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an...

A new biography of William Shakespeare that explores his private life in Stratford-upon-Avon, his personal aspirations, his self-determination, and his relations with the members of his family and his neighbours. The Private Life of William...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781788551069Author Gerald DaweFormat HardbackPage Count 200Imprint Irish Academic Press LtdPublisher Irish Academic Press Ltd

How did individuals write about their lives before a modern tradition of diaries and autobiographies was established? Adam Smyth examines the kinds of texts that sixteenth- or seventeenth-century individuals produced to register their life, in the...

In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up freedman Tom Windham's 1937 remark "we should have our liberty 'cause . . . us is human flesh" as a point of departure for an extended meditation on questions of the human, epistemology, and the historical ways in...

"...not merely interesting and novel, but also exceedingly provocative and heuristically fertile." -The Review of Metaphysics "...essential reading for anyone interesting in...the new reader-centered forms of criticism." -Library Journal In this...