Literary Criticism

Seamus Heaney's poetic career has been one of constant development and expansion, and his place among the world's greatest literary figures is universally acknowledged. When it first appeared in 1986, Neil Corcoran's A Student's Guide to Seamus Heaney...

ADAPTED INTO A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JIM BROADBENT "A painful, funny, frightening, moving, marvellous book ... everybody should read it" - Nick Hornby And when did you last see your father? Was it when they burnt the coffin? Put the lid on...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781628370515Author Mark J BodaFormat PaperbackPage Count 238Imprint Society of Biblical LiteraturePublisher Society of Biblical LiteratureWeight(grams)...

A Sunday Times BestsellerChristopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the eyes of charlatans and hucksters, exposing falsehood and decrying hypocrisy...

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy...

In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered-the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, who had...

Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and culture. Her work has constantly remained in print in the UK and US (and in numerous translated editions) since the appearance of her first...

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture...

Fairytales are one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, and forests one of our most ancient landscapes. Both evoke a similar sensation in us - we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying. In this fascinating...

The work of Michel Houellebecq - one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time - is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was...

'Lorca brought an understanding of the paradox that was Spain - sensuality chafing under a rigid moral code, individual desire at war with tradition.' Manuel Duran Federico Garcia Lorca is perhaps the most celebrated of all twentieth-century Spanish...

The author of "The Barracks Thief" and "Hunters in the Snow" recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the...

Destabilizing Milton challenges the widely accepted view of Milton as a poet of absolute, unquestioning certainty. In Paradise Lost , Milton confronts the failure of the Revolution by creating a poem that refuses to grant the reader any interpretive...

This Element presents new cultural, social, and economic perspectives on the eighteenth-century London masquerade through an in-depth analysis of the classic domino costume. Constructing the object biography of the domino through material, visual, and...

Feminism has dramatically influenced the way literary texts are read, taught and evaluated. Feminist literary theory has deliberately transgressed traditional boundaries between literature, philosophy and the social sciences in order to understand how...

In her early twenties, Esther Rutter suffered an acute mental breakdown while teaching English in Japan. Sectioned and held in a Japanese psychiatric institution until she could be flown home under escort, her recovery only began when she came to live...

Beginning with Dante's liberation from Hell, Purgatory relates his ascent, accompanied by Virgil, of the Mount of Purgatory - a mountain of nine levels, formed from rock forced upwards when God threw Satan into depths of the earth. As he travels through...

'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe' E. M. Forster E. M. Forster's description of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) perfectly encapsulates the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history...

Winner of the 2016 Goodreads Choice Award, the princess saves herself in this one is a collection of poetry about resilience. It is about writing your own ending. From Amanda Lovelace, a poetry collection in four parts: the princess, the damsel, the...

The wit and wisdom of Wonderland in one handy companion. From the indisputable logic of Tweedledum to the nonsensical riddles posed by the Mad Hatter, the witty rejoinders of the Red Queen to the strange wisdom of the Cheshire Cat, there is no denying...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781999923808Author Michael RosenFormat PaperbackPage Count 44Imprint Michael RosenPublisher Michael RosenWeight(grams) 68gDimensions(mm) 210mm * 148mm * 3mm

A Financial Times Book of the Year Though we might not realise it, our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the...

Domestic interiors and housing environments have historically been portrayed as a framing device for the representation of individuals and social groups. Drawing together a wide and eclectic collection of well known, and less familiar, works by writers...

Spanning the fifth century to the sixteenth, and ranging from Afghanistan to Spain, this unique collection provides a profound insight into the sheer vitality and depth of Classical Arabic literature. From the earliest surviving fragments of The Thousand...

Coriolanus is perhaps the most brilliant political play ever written. Set in Ancient Rome, it remains a gripping psychological study of the relationship between personality and politics. The introduction to this new edition considers Shakespeare's...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780671528584Author Jack TrimpeyFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Pocket BooksPublisher Simon & Schuster

'A revelation ... as well as being sympathetic to the plight of children, it is hilarious' A. N. WilsonThe hero of Dickens's flamboyantly exuberant novel, Nicholas Nickleby, is left penniless after his father's death and forced to make his own way in the...

A data-driven deep dive into a legendary comics author's subversion of gender norms within the bestselling comic of its time. By the time Chris Claremont's run as author of Uncanny X-Men ended in 1991, he had changed comic books forever. During his...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780994047106Author Oliver PickleFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Metonymy PressPublisher Metonymy Press

In this classic work, often described as "The History of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair," Denis de Rougemont explores the psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to Hollywood. At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is...

Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at...

Do you belong to an amateur theatre group wanting to 'do an Ayckbourn'? Are you the Artistic Director of a professional theatre seeking to slot an Ayckbourn into next season? Are you a fan of Ayckbourn's work and would love a handy reference book? A...

Taste as Experience puts the pleasure of food at the center of human experience. It shows how the sense of taste informs our preferences for and relationship to nature, pushes us toward ethical practices of consumption, and impresses upon us the...

William Shakespeare's Othello (1601-2) has delighted and disturbed theatre audiences for the past four centuries, and remains one of the most frequently performed and widely studied of his plays. This volume is a broad-ranging guide to Othello, providing...

'Adrian Noble vigorously highlights the extraordinary rhythmic, linguistic patterns Shakespeare gives the speaker. Any actor will find this book invaluable. For any student of Shakespeare it should be essential.' (From the Foreword by Ralph Fiennes)'How...

He is one of the inventors of rock criticism. His first book, The Aesthetics of Rock (acclaimed by Greil Marcus as "a disemboweling of rock's soft white underbelly"), became an instant cult classic when published in 1970. And for the next thirty years...

From the author of 'Stuart: A Life Backwards'; a warm and witty portrait of a harmless, eccentric, bona fide genius. Alexander Master's landlord, Simon, lives in the basement of their Cambridge house. Between teetering towers of outdated maps...

Shakespeare and Dickens, first published in 1996, traces Dickens' own interest in Shakespeare from childhood, not only through his own reading and performance but also through numerous theatrical, literary and artistic sources. The book proceeds to...

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at...

Ferdinand forbids his widowed sister to marry again. When he discovers that she is not only married but had a child he is driven mad with fury. The Duchess of Malfi is a study in strong characters, dark deeds and dreadful revenge. This edition includes...