Literary Criticism

How the written text became accessible to wider audiences in medieval Egypt and Syria. Medieval Islamic societies belonged to the most bookish cultures of their period. Using a wide variety of documentary, narrative and normative sources, Konrad...

Harry Potter. The name conjures up J.K. Rowling's wondrous world of magic that has captured the imaginations of millions on both the printed page and the silver screen with bestselling novels and blockbuster films. The true magic found in this children's...

In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned-and aesthetically responsive-to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR...

This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous...

This book explores Virgil's poetic and mythical transformation of Roman imperialist ideology. The Romans saw an analogy between the ordered workings of the natural universe and the proper functioning of their own expanding empire; between orbis and urbs...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history,...

In this lucid and fascinating book, Peter Brooks argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the nineteenth century, he moves on to Balzac and Henry James to...

The phenomenal success of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code has given new life to the perennial debate about the nature and meaning of the mysterious Holy Grail. The story of the Grail, usually identified as some kind of mystical vessel, has gripped the...

This literary detective story throws light on the problem of what Shakespeare was doing between leaving school and appearing as an actor and playwright in London. Bringing forward historic and documentary evidence, this text argues that Shakespeare...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679433132Author Dante AlighieriFormat HardbackPage Count 960Imprint Everyman's Library USAPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 828gDimensions(mm)...

This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays...

Has theory neglected literature? Often literary and cultural theory, which goes by the nickname "Theory," has seemed to be the theory of everything except literature: theory of language, of sexuality, of history, of the body, of the psyche, of meaning...

This title features new scholarship informed by both historicist and metaphysical approaches, offering original readings of the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth and their reception. The history of responses to the works of William Wordsworth and William...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781999737603Author Neil BowenFormat PaperbackPage Count 124Imprint Peripeteia PressPublisher Peripeteia PressWeight(grams) 186gDimensions(mm) 234mm * 156mm...

Prose fiction, although not always associated with classical antiquity, flourished in the early Roman Empire, not only in realistic Latin novels but also and indeed principally in the Greek ideal romance of love and adventure. Enormously popular in the...

This is the first critical biography of Xavier Marmier. The celebrity of Marmier was such that his death made headline news in most major newspapers in France. Marmier made his reputation as a traveller, travel writer, translator, literary critic,...

Emile Durkheim's 1897 On Suicide is widely recognized as one of the foundational classic texts of sociology. It is also one that shows the degree to which strong interpretative skills can often provide the bedrock for high-level analysis. Durkheim's aim...

This selection of Mayakovsky's work covers his entire career-from the earliest pre-revolutionary lyrics to a poem found in a notebook after his suicide. Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page, and a fresh, colloquial...

The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially...

The Historical Arthur and The Gawain Poet: Studies on Arthurian and Other Traditions delves into the origins of Arthur and reveals the author of the famous Gawain Manuscript. Its first part contains evidence for the Arthur of film and legend as a real...

MARY SHELLEY's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus grew out of a parlor game and a nightmare vision. The story of the book's origin is a famous one, first told in the introduction Mary Shelley wrote for the 1831 edition of the novel. The two...

What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, our understanding of the cognition of literature was transformed by scientific discoveries, such as the mirror neuron system and its role in empathy. Addressing questions such as why we care so deeply...

In 1623 the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell assembled Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, better known as The First Folio. In doing so they preserved literature's most dramatically vital and poetically rich account of our...

Prima Donna: The Psychology of Maria Callas explores the psychological mechanisms underlying the hypnotic power of Callas's artistry and the unfolding of her tragic life story. Although precipitated by the trauma and shame that followed her abandonment...

Mothers and daughters-the female figures neglected by classic psychoanalysis and submerged in traditional narrative-are at the center of this book. The novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers from the Western European and North American...

This is the first book-length study of Forster's posthumously-published novel. Nine essays focus exclusively on Maurice and its dynamic afterlives in literature, film and new media during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Begun in 1913 and...

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of...

This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and...

Stratford made the man, but London made the phenomenon that is Shakespeare. This volume takes an historical approach to Shakespeare's connections with London. It explores Stratford's various links with the capital, significant locations for Shakespeare's...

Books V-IX of the Confessions trace five crucial years in the life of Augustine, from his debut as a teacher of rhetoric in North Africa to his baptism as a Christian and the renunciation of a worldly career in Milan. This commentary will be invaluable...

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female...

Cigarettes are bad for you; that is why they are so good. With its origins in the author's urgent desire to stop smoking, Cigarettes Are Sublime offers a provocative look at the literary, philosophical, and cultural history of smoking. Richard Klein...

One of the central images conjured up by the gothic novel is that of a shadowy spectre slowly rising from a mysterious abyss. In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Maggie Kilgour argues that the ghost of the gothic is now resurrected in the critical...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780375706394Author Henry PetroskiFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 329gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

Few English books are as widely known, underread, and underappreciated as Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Stephanie Shirilan laments that modern scholars often treat the Anatomy as an unmediated repository of early modern views on melancholy,...

How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has...

"Take Faust, what is it? A 'tragedy', as its author states? A great philosophical tale? A collection of lyrical insights? Who can say. How about Moby-Dick? Encyclopedia, novel or romance? Or even a 'singular medley,' as one anonymous 1851 review put it? ...

From 1815 to 1823 the Italian influence on English literature was at its zenith. While English tourists flocked to Italy, a pervasive Italianism coloured many facets of London life, including poetry, periodicals, translation, and even the Queen's trial...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781585102273Author VergilFormat PaperbackPage Count 188Imprint Focus Publishing/R Pullins & CoPublisher Focus Publishing/R Pullins & CoWeight(grams) 313g