Literary Criticism

"William of Rubruck was a Franciscan friar who wrote the first great travel book about Asia. In 1253-55 he made the journey from the Holy Land to the court of the Great Khan Moengke at Qaraqorum in Mongolia and back again. . . . William was interested in...

Keith Thomas's classic study of all forms of popular belief has been influential for so long now that it is difficult to remember how revolutionary it seemed when it first appeared. By publishing Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas became the first...

From Ray Bradbury to Neil Gaiman, from Blade Runner to "Battle Star Galactica", science fiction has emerged from the margins of popular culture to claim a significant presence across media in print, film, and television. It has shaped our vision of the...

"Backgrounds and Contexts" is arranged under three headings. "Composition and Publication History" combines modern scholarship with contemporary materials to elucidate the novel's composition and publication history and present different aspects of...

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith's novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by...

This anthology brings together key articles translated into English for the first time from Italian debates concerning Antonio Gramsci's writings on language and translation as central to his entire social and political thought. It includes recent...

A fascinating look at the rich but under-appreciated Eastern sources behind the Narnia book C. S. Lewis was no great traveller but he was a prodigious bibliophile who absorbed the world's traditions of myth, religion, and cosmology. The Chronicles of...

This collection of essays explores the extensive use of Latin and Greek literary texts in a range of recent poetry written in English. It contains both contributions from poets, who include Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley, talking about...

What value does theatre have in Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century? How has theatre responded to the challenge of remaining relevant in the media-saturated world of today? These are the questions that underpin this stimulating study of...

Over the last ten years the field of Blake studies has profited from new discoveries about the life of Blake and his writings. This book examines the effect that Blake's mother's recently discovered Moravianism has had on our understanding of his poetry,...

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been characterised as the 'age of speed' but they also witnessed a reanimation of still life across different art forms. This book takes an original approach to still life in modern literature and...

Originally published in 1996, this book is a study of two of the central themes of medieval German mythology, the Dietrich and Nibelung legends. It traces its two legendary topics form their historical roots during the last centuries of the Roman Empire...

James Joyce's Ulysses, once regarded as obscure and obscene, is now viewed as one of the masterpieces of world literature. Yet Joyce's final novel, Finnegans Wake, to which he devoted seventeen years, remains virtually unread, except by scholarly...

In "The Company We Keep", Wayne C. Booth argues for the relocation of ethics to the center of our engagement with literature. But the questions he asks are not confined to morality. Returning ethics to its root sense, Booth proposes that the...

Marie de France was a medieval poet who was probably born in France and who lived in England during the twelfth century. Prominent among the earliest poets writing in the French vernacular, she helped shape the style and genres of later medieval poetry...

This is the extraordinary life of a poetic genius. Along with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas is by any reckoning a major first world war poet. A war poet is not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against...

Terry Eagleton's Tragedy provides a major critical and analytical account of the concept of 'tragedy' from its origins in the Ancient world right down to the twenty-first century. A major new intellectual endeavour from one of the world's finest, and...

What will 21st century fiction look like? Acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch examines some of our most beloved writers, including Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolano, and Margaret Atwood, to better understand literature in the age of...

Shakesqueer puts the most exciting queer theorists in conversation with the complete works of William Shakespeare. Exploring what is odd, eccentric, and unexpected in the Bard's plays and poems, these theorists highlight not only the many ways that...

Many books discuss the theology and doctrine of the medieval liturgy: there is no dearth of information on the history of the liturgy, the structure and development of individual services, and there is much discussion of specific texts, chants, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780807068809Author Mary OliverFormat HardbackPage Count 96Imprint Beacon PressPublisher Beacon PressWeight(grams) 556gDimensions(mm) 211mm * 244mm * 13mm

Love's Victory by Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651) is the first romantic comedy written in English by a woman. The Revels Plays publishes for the first time a fully-authorised, modern spelling edition of the Penshurst manuscript, the only copy of the play...

'She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story,...

A guide to managing data in the digital age.Winner of the ALCTS Outstanding Publication Award by the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services, Winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award by the Society of American ArchivistsMany people...

A radical reexamination of the textual and archaeological evidence about Augustus and the PalatineCaesar Augustus (63 BC-AD 14), who is usually thought of as the first Roman emperor, lived on the Palatine Hill, the place from which the word "palace"...

Time has passed since 'having a PhD in children's literature' was a funny joke in You've Got Mail. Children's literature research is now one of the most dynamic fields of literary criticism and has a bright future ahead as children's writers and...

Few classical stories are as exciting as that of Jason and the Golden Fleece. The legend of the boy, who discovers a new identity as son of a usurped king and leads a crew of demi-gods and famous heroes, has resonated through the ages, rumbling like the...

A long-awaited corrective to the controversial idea of world literature, from a major voice in the field.Katerina Clark charts interwar efforts by Soviet, European, and Asian leftist writers to create a Eurasian commons: a single cultural space that...

Autism was not a recognised disorder in Jane Austen's lifetime, nor for well over a century after her death. However there were certainly people who had autism, and Phyllis Ferguson Bottomer proposes that Austen wrote about them, without knowing what it...

The question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays has been the subject of furious debate among scholars for over 150 years. Everything known about the facts of William Shakespeare's life seems incompatible with the extraordinary genius of his writing. How...

Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USX-NONEX-NONEMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Bernadette Mayer has been one of the most influential poets of the late 20th century and into the present. Her celebrated and revolutionary first books have long been out of print,...

Blending the critical essay with poetry, Gate of Lilacs is a collection of verse written by Clive James in response to - and profoundly inspired by - the work of Marcel Proust.'James picks out the characters, the motifs and the moments that set his...

Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction examines how contemporary Irish authors have taken up the history of the Irish woman migrant. It situates these writers' work in relation to larger discourses of exile in the Irish literary tradition and...

Shakespeare's Blank Verse: An Alternative History is a study both of Shakespeare's versification and of its place in the history of early modern blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). It ranges from the continental precursors of English blank verse in...

How did women Surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Claude Cahun take up the question of female identity in terms of their own aesthetic and intellectual practice? What was the response of women analysts such as Joan Riviere to Freud's...

The first two chapters of this book isolate and describe the literary phenomenon of the Sophoclean tragic hero. In all but one of the extant Sophoclean dramas, a heroic figure who is compounded of the same literary elements faced a situation which is...

Many writing instructors teach writing through autobiography. By considering the lives of others and then contemplating their own lives, aspiring writers discover a wellspring of material that can be used in their prose. While not explicitly for courses,...

John Maynard Keynes's 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money is a perfect example of the global power of critical thinking. A radical reconsideration of some of the founding principles and accepted axioms of classical economics at the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814348628Author Cathy Yue WangFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Wayne State University PressPublisher Wayne State University Press

English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the sixties, and throughout the rest of the century...