Literary Criticism

There they sit, the great tomes of classical literature, taunting you with their length and difficulty, as you ask: which books are the most important and why - and what's actually any good? Why does most writing about the classics have words like...

Winner of the 2016 Shakespeare's Globe Book Award Whether the apocalyptic storm of King Lear or the fleeting thunder imagery of Hamlet, the shipwrecks of the comedies or the thunderbolt of Pericles, there is an instance of storm in every one of...

What is satire? How can we define it? Is it a weapon for radical change or fundamentally conservative? Is satire funny or cruel? Does it always need a target or victim? Combining thematic, theoretical and historical approaches, John T. Gilmore introduces...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781328470225Author Consultant Statistician Walter BenjaminFormat PaperbackPage Count 416Imprint Mariner Books ClassicsPublisher Mariner Books...

Metamorphosis is a dynamic principle of creation, vital to natural processes of generation and evolution, growth and decay, yet it also threatens personal identity if human beings are subject to a continual process of bodily transformation...

Coming to prominence with the nineteenth-century novel, literary realism has most often been associated with the insistence that art cannot turn away from the more sordid and harsh aspects of human existence. However, because realism is unavoidably tied...

Wallace Stevens is a major American poet and a central figure in modernist studies and twentieth-century poetry. This Companion introduces students to his work. An international team of distinguished contributors presents a unified picture of Stevens'...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781398422940Author Graham JohnFormat PaperbackPage Count 280Imprint Austin Macauley PublishersPublisher Austin Macauley Publishers

"Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain" is a landmark work in contemporary literary and cultural analysis. It offers a provocative and brilliant account of political change since 1945, and how such change shaped the cultural output of our...

In the eighteenth century, the novel became established as a popular literary form all over Europe. Britain proved an especially fertile ground, with Defoe, Fielding, Richardson and Burney as early exponents of the novel form. The Cambridge Introduction...

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the worldEnglish has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern...

Why do we read literature and how do we judge it? C. S. Lewis's classic An Experiment in Criticism springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He argues...

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considers deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and...

This book is the outcome of years of research in Austen archives, and stems from the original family biography by W. and R. A. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: her Life and Letters. Jane Austen, A Family Record was first published in 1989, and this edition...

Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern...

This collection of fifteen essays by leading scholars examines the extraordinary diversity and richness of the writing produced in response to, and as part of, the upheaval in the religious, political and cultural life of the nation which constituted the...

Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference reveals the relationship between racial discrimination and the struggle for upward social mobility in the early modern world. Reading Shakespeare's plays alongside contemporaneous conduct literature - how-to...

Best Fifteen Books of March 2019, Refinery29 Best Nonfiction Books of 2019, Paste Magazine Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Fetishized, demonized, celebrated, and outlawed,...

In essays on literary images of lesbianism from Defoe and Diderot to Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes, on the homosexual reputation of Marie Antoinette, on the lesbian writings of Anne Lister, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Janet Flanner, and on Henry...

The Icelandic sagas, composed between the twelfth and the nineteenth centuries, are one of the world's great literary treasures. After an extended and lively introduction to the genre, Ralph O'Connor provides new translations for five of the greatest of...

Celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2017, Tom Stoppard's witty and exhilarating play is repackaged as a stylish Faber Modern Classic.Tom Stoppard's reputation as a playwright was made when his dazzling debut, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, opened...

The best-loved poems by the "Hoosier Poet" are here collected to read and cherish time and time again. Included are some of Riley's most durable and endearing works-poems about nature, home, and country as well as the dialect poems for which Riley is...

"Black, White and in Colour" offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past 20 years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly...

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered...

Revenge has long been central to European culture. From Homer to Nietzsche, St Paul to Sylvia Plath, numerous major authors have been fascinated by its emotional intensity, and by the questions which it raises about violence, sexuality, death, and the...

"Introductions to British Literature and Culture" are practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series are designed to help introduce a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, literary and critical...

Epic poetry and tragic drama provide us with some of the richest ancient Greek depictions of women who are married to soldiers. In tales of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we encounter these mythical warriors'...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781907776281Author Uttara NatarajanFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint CONNELL PUBLISHING LTDPublisher CONNELL PUBLISHING LTD

This book is a comprehensive guide to the richness and diversity of the Romantic field. It includes 46 specially commissioned chapters by an international team of leading scholars and combines chapters offering background and contextual information with...

"This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."--The Posthuman Dada Guide The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all...

The Platform Sutra comprises a wide range of important Chan/Zen Buddhist teachings. Purported to contain the autobiography and sermons of Huineng (638-713), the legendary Sixth Patriarch of Chan, the sutra has been popular among monastics and the...

Ethos and Narrative Interpretation examines the fruitfulness of the concept of ethos for the theory and analysis of literary narrative. The notion of ethos refers to the broadly persuasive effects of the image one may have of a speaker's psychology,...

In this major study, leading Austen scholar John Wiltshire offers new interpretations of Jane Austen's six novels, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818). Much...

This third volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett focuses on the years when Beckett is striving to find a balance between the demands put upon him by his growing international fame, and his need for the peace and silence from which new writing might...

Five exciting new plays for young people written specifically in response to a world in the midst of a pandemic, accompanied by a handbook from Wonder Fools theatre company with guidance for staging the plays either online or live in the space. ...

Known only as the "Ex-Colored Man," the protagonist in Johnson's novel is forced to choose between celebrating his African American heritage or "passing" as an average white man in a post-Reconstruction America that is rapidly changing. This Norton...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156594431Author Stanislaw LemFormat PaperbackPage Count 312Imprint Harper VoyagerPublisher Harper Voyager

Time is integral to human culture. Over the last two centuries people's relationship with time has been transformed through industrialisation, trade and technology. But the first such life-changing transformation - under Christianity's influence -...

Nikos Kazantzakis is no stranger to the heroes of Greek antiquity. In this historical novel based on the life of Alexander the Great, Kazantzakis has drawn on both the rich tradition of Greek legend and the documented manuscripts from the archives of...

Franz Kafka's writing has had a wide-reaching influence on European literature, culture and thought. The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, offers a comprehensive account of his life and work, providing a rounded contemporary appraisal of Central Europe's...