Literary Criticism

Mark Twain's complete, uncensored Autobiography was an instant bestseller when the first volume was published in 2010, on the centennial of the author's death, as he requested. Published to rave reviews, the Autobiography was hailed as the capstone of...

Improvisation informs a vast array of human activity, from creative practices in art, dance, music, and literature to everyday conversation and the relationships to natural and built environments that surround and sustain us. The two volumes of The...

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton...

The fascinating history of American bookishness as told through the sale of Charles Lamb's library in 1848 Charles Lamb's library-a heap of sixty scruffy old books singed with smoke, soaked with gin, sprinkled with crumbs, stripped of illustrations,...

Why do we have the constant feeling that disaster is looming? Beyond the images of atomic apocalypse that have haunted us for decades, we are dazzled now by an array of possible catastrophe scenarios: climate change, financial crises, environmental...

The first book-length study of modern Peruvian narrative and its resurgence in the 1990s, focussing on Jaime Bayly, Ivan Thays and Jorge Eduardo Benavides. This book provides the first look at the dynamic resurgence of Peruvian narrative since the...

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab...

In The Codex, published in 1954, C.H. Roberts studied the process by which in the early centuries of our era the roll as the vehicle for literature was replaced by the codex, which has remained the format of the book ever since. New evidence that has...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781608687695Author Dean SluyterFormat PaperbackPage Count 312Imprint New World LibraryPublisher New World Library

A bold reimagining of the literary history of Decadence through a close examination of the transnational contexts of Oscar Wilde's classic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.Building upon a large body of archival and critical work on Oscar Wilde's only...

Constellating four central topics-ghosts, colors, animals, and bees-in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, "metaphysical I," which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In...

The Robber with the Witch's Head presents almost fifty new stories about demons and clever maidens and princes. Bursting with life, this is a storyteller's dream, full of adventure and magic, translated by Jack Zipes.About the AuthorLaura Gonzenbach was...

Reflections on a lost poem and its rediscovery by contemporary poetsGilgamesh is the most ancient long poem known to exist. It is also the newest classic in the canon of world literature. Lost for centuries to the sands of the Middle East but found again...

For thirty years the "death of the author" has been a familiar poststructuralist slogan in literary theory, widely understood and much debated as a dismissal of the author, a declaration of the writer's irrelevance to the readers experience. In this...

In this key anthology Derek Pearsall offers a radically new approach to those teaching and studying English writing from Geoffrey Chaucer to the early work of Edmund Spenser.About the AuthorDerek Pearsall is the Gurney Professor of English at Harvard...

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary...

From his earliest success in 1945 with the poignant The Glass Menagerie, until his final curtain call with the 1979 production of The Two-Character Play, Tennessee Williams never stopped experimenting with theatrical techniques and striving to explain...

The later years of Elizabeth and the reign of James I were the age of Shakespeare, but the age also of Sidney, Spenser, and Donne, of fellow dramatists Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster, and of the prose writers Nashe, Bacon, and Burton. This book examines...

'A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life' This edition provides a clear and accessible introduction to Shakespeare's enduring tale of ill-fated lovers. Hannah August pays particular attention to the dramatic function of the famous prologue and...

The 15 writers featured in this new anthology of French short stories represent the best of the genre, from Merimee to the present day. The selection includes writers as diverse as Balzac, Colette, Duras and Boulanger and is designed to introduce...

Emily Dickinson, poet of the interior life, imagined words/swords, hurling barbed syllables/piercing. Nothing about her adult appearance or habitation revealed such a militant soul. Only poems, written quietly in a room of her own, often hand-stitched in...

Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a...

This volume offers a selection of important contemporary criticism on two of Jane Austen's most popular and widely-studied novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. The volume includes recent essays from Alastair Duckworth, Marilyn Butler, D...

"Reader's Guides" provide a comprehensive starting point for any advanced student, giving an overview of the context, criticism and influence of key works. Each guide also offers students fresh critical insights and provides a practical...

Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy described to a colleague, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work? In Making Stories, the eminent...

Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern...

The second volume in the Reading and Studying Literature series, co-published with the Open University, introduces students to European romanticism and Victorian culture. Each period is discussed in terms of an overarching theme, providing a clear focus...

Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer called "one of the most passionate, energetic and honest poets living," was that rare phenomenon-a distinguished poet who was also an inspiring teacher. The Triggering Town is Hugo's classic collection of lectures,...

A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fictionNow praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds...

Angela Carter (1940-92) is widely known for her literary fairy tales, particularly those appearing in ""The Bloody Chamber"". Her stylishly creative appropriation and adaptation of fairy-tale patterns, motifs and content are evident...

Genuine Pretending is an innovative and comprehensive new reading of the Zhuangzi that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D'Ambrosio show how this Daoist classic, contrary to contemporary...

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice.In more than 30 essays, the...

The neighborhoods of New Orleans have given rise to an extraordinary outpouring of important writing. Over the last century and a half or so, these stories and songs have given the city its singular place in the human imagination. This book leads the...

Rue Ordener, Rue Labat is a moving memoir by the distinguished French philosopher Sarah Kofman. It opens with the horrifying moment in July 1942 when the author's father, the rabbi of a small synagogue, was dragged by police from the family home on Rue...

In writing Le Livre de Promethea Helene Cixous set for herself the task of bridging the immeasurable distance between love and language. She describes a love between two women in its totality, experienced as both a physical presence and a sense of...

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...

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ life was dominated by the negative image of "the closet"--the metaphorical space where that which was deemed "queer" was hidden from a hostile public view. Literary studies of queer themes and characters in crime...

This handbook represents the interdisciplinary and international field of "cultural memory studies" for the first time in one volume. Articles by renowned international scholars offer readers a unique overview of the key concepts of cultural memory...

The twin concerns of primitive and metropolitan life nourished T.S. Eliot's imagination through his childhood and student years and developed to mould and underpin his writing. Ranging from Dr Sweany of St Louis and Eliot's intense interest in...

There is an increasingly widespread sense that Europe is in crisis. Notions of a shared European identity and a common European culture appear to be losing their purchase. This crisis is often seen as a conflict between a cosmopolitan and a nationalist...