Literary Criticism

Why is liberalism so often dismissed by thinkers from both the left and the right? To those calling for wholesale transformation or claiming a monopoly on "realistic" conceptions of humanity, liberalism's assured progressivism can seem hard to swallow...

The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens's Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in...

This 1998 book takes an alternative look at the courtly masque in early seventeenth-century England. For a generation, the masque has been a favourite topic of New Historicism, because it has been seen as part of the process by which artistic works...

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the...

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain...

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...

Style is everywhere, but it evades criticism especially now, when an age of interpretation asks us to look right through it. And yet style does so much tacit work, telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What place does it have among our...

A reimagining of Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an original treatment of human life shaped by innovations in seventeenth-century science and medicine.   In 1624, poet and preacher John Donne published Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a book that...

Carolyne Larrington has gathered together a uniquely comprehensive collection of writing by, for and about medieval women, spanning one thousand years and Europe from Iceland to Byzantiu. The extracts are arranged thematically, dealing with the central...

This book examines the depiction of the Delta region of Nigeria through literature and other cultural art forms.The Niger Delta has been thrust into the global limelight due to resource extraction and conflict, but it is also a region with a rich...

This critical guide introduces major novelists and themes in British fiction from 1975 to 2005. It engages with concepts such as postmodernism, feminism, gender and the postcolonial, and examines the place of fiction within broader debates in...

Laughter in stitches.The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 - ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. This...

Paul Alvarus wrote the Indiculus luminosus in 854 in response to the executions of a number of Córdoban Christians, beginning with the monk Isaac in 851, who had denounced Muhammad in public. The first half of the treatise offers an extended apologia in...

What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination...

Recent commentators have portrayed feminist critics as grim-faced ideologues who are destroying the study of literature. Feminists, they claim, reduce art to politics and are hostile to any form of aesthetic pleasure. "Literature After Feminism" is the...

The first edition was regarded as the definitive survey of Gothic and related terror writing in English. No other text considers this genre on such a scale and covers the theoretical perspectives so comprehensively. In the latest edition, the broad range...

The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard "Why I Write" may prove to be the most difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to...

Private faces in public placesAre wiser and nicerThan public faces in private places.W.H. Auden, dedication to Stephen Spender, 1932Stephen Spender wrote almost a million words of journal entries between his September Journal in 1939 and his death in...

This book offers a comprehensive account of modern Spanish culture, tracing its dramatic and often unexpected development from its beginnings after the Revolution of 1868 to the present day. Specially-commissioned essays by leading experts provide...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156701761Author George OrwellFormat PaperbackPage Count 456Imprint Wadsworth Publishing Co IncPublisher Cengage Learning, IncWeight(grams)...

The book is the first to analyse the textual construction of a national Spanish cuisine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This book looks at the textual attempts to construct a national cuisine made in Spain at the turn of the last...

How does the work of influential theorist Bruno Latour offer a fresh angle on the practices and purposes of the humanities?In recent years, defenses of the humanities have tended to argue along predictable lines: the humanities foster empathy, the...

Robin Hood, whether riding through the glen, robbing the rich to pay the poor or giving the Sheriff of Nottingham his come-uppance, is one of the most captivating and controversial legendary figures. Was there a historical figure behind the legends? Did...

This book provides students and scholars of classical literature with a practical guide to modern literary theory and criticism. Using a clear and concise approach, it navigates readers through various theoretical approaches, including Russian Formalism,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781846823855Author Aidan DoyleFormat HardbackPage Count 240Imprint Four Courts Press LtdPublisher Four Courts Press LtdWeight(grams) 590g

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian...

A new approach to the visual arts in the work of John Donne The five known portraits of John Donne and the many artworks bequeathed in his will bear witness to his interest in painting. His interest in art is also evident in his writings, with poems...

The text, based on the first edition, is accompanied by explanatory footnotes. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes selections from Smollett's early poetry as well as non-fiction writing. "Criticism" presents the most important reviews of the book...

In 1990, Robert Young's White Mythologies set out to question the very concepts of history and the West. Is it possible, he asked, to write history that avoids the trap of Eurocentrism? Is history simply a Western myth? His reflections on these topics...

This Guide steers students through the critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies from the sixteenth century to the present day. Guides students through four centuries of critical writing on Shakespeare's tragedies. Covers both significant early views...

A comprehensive account of the language of Ancient Greek civilization in a single volume, with contributions from leading international scholars covering the historical, geographical, sociolinguistic, and literary perspectives of the language. A...

Born in Algeria in 1937, Helene Cixous achieved world fame for her short stories, criticism, and fictionalized autobiography (Dedans, 1969). Her work quickly became controversial because it frankly tested a distinction between male and female writing...

This is the first comprehensive history of Spanish literature to be published in English since the 1970s. It brings together experts from the USA, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Together, the essays cover the full range of Spanish poetry, prose, and...

In The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his...

This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Robert Frost's poetry and life. Frost remains one of the most memorable and beguiling of modern poets. Writing in the tradition of Virgil, Milton, and...

Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author...

Doubles and Hybrids in Latin American Gothic focuses on a recurrent motif that is fundamental in the Gothic-the double. This volume explores how this ancient notion acquires tremendous force in a region, Latin America, which is itself defined by...

The revised and updated edition of Zinnie Harris's powerful reimagining of Shakespeare's brutal tragedy, telling Lady Macbeth's story as it has never been heard before. 'A clever, heartfelt and, in the broadest and most persuasive sense, feminist...

This revisionist narrative of poetic change in the twentieth century challenges the accepted notions of what poetry is and can be in the new century and makes the case for the seminal place of poetry in contemporary culture.About the Author Marjorie...

A scholarly edition of an essay by Sir Thomas Browne. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.Book InformationISBN 9780198114291Author Thomas BrowneFormat HardbackPage Count...