Literary Criticism

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 *...

Generation Anthropocene. Storms of My Grandchildren. Our Children's Trust. Why do these and other attempts to imagine the planet's uncertain future return us-again and again-to the image of the child? In The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon demonstrates...

Words change: they immigrate and emigrate. They reflect changing fashions and roam across centuries. This book delves into their origins: Where do words come from? How do their meanings change? Why do we stop using them? This book explores over...

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...

Shakespearean tragedy and Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Ulysses, Frankenstei and The Waste Land-all are celebrated "wonders" of modern literature, whether in its mandarin or popular form. However, it is the fact that these texts are so central to our...

"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? ...

Emphasising the increasingly regional or national approach to the legacies of colonialism, this Reader provides an entirely new way for students to engage with an important and complex area of discourse.About the AuthorGregory Castle teaches English and...

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

When it was first published, Lyrical Ballads enraged the critics of the day: Wordsworth and Coleridge had given poetry a voice, one decidedly different to that which had been voiced before. This acclaimed Routledge Classics edition offers the reader the...

With the story of a madeleine dipped in tea, Marcel Proust makes famous moments that transport one to an earlier time thought lost forever. His In Search of Lost Time announces a quest narrative with lost time as its goal. We follow the journey of a...

Camus' sparse parable about the human condition is one of the great stories of the 20th Century, here adapted for the stage by Booker prize winner Ben Okri. A faceless man who can no longer pretend, Mersault commits a senseless murder under the glare...

The definitive biography of Marvel legend Stan Lee, celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.Stan Lee's extraordinary life was as epic as the superheroes he co-created, from the Amazing Spider-Man to the Mighty Avengers. His ideas and voice are at...

This collection of prefaces, originally written for the 1909 multivolume "New York" Edition of Henry James' fiction, first appeared in book form in 1934 with an introduction by poet and critic R. P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great...

Georg Lukacs (1885-1971) is now recognized as one of the most innovative and best-informed literary critics of the twentieth century. Trained in the German philosophic tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he escaped Nazi persecution by fleeing to the...

Brian Friel is widely recognized as Ireland's greatest living playwright, winning an international reputation through such acclaimed works as Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). This 2006 collection of specially commissioned essays...

The life of Rilke's work is in its words, and this book attends closely to the development of that life as it unfolds over Rilke's career. What is a poem, and how does it act upon us when we read? This is a question of the greatest interest to Rilke, who...

Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France's most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L'Etranger and the architect of...

Who is more important: the reader, or the writer? Originally published in French in 1966, Pierre Macherey's first and most famous work, A Theory of Literary Production dared to challenge perceived wisdom, and quickly established him as a pivotal figure...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780061769122Author Kenji YoshinoFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint CollinsPublisher HarperCollins Publishers IncWeight(grams) 236gDimensions(mm) 204mm *...

Although nearly everyone has heard the name of Robin Hood, few have actually read any medieval tales about the legendary outlaw. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren set out to correct this discrepancy in their comprehensive collection of all...

Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human "signature" appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the...

An Introduction to Applied Semiotics presents nineteen semiotics tools for text and image analysis. Covering a variety of different schools and approaches, together with the author's own original approach, this is a full and synthetic introduction to...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060956387Author R. JarrellFormat HardbackPage Count 400Imprint HarperPaperbacksPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

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...

It is canonical as a cultural text, rather than a purely literary one, as this Norton Critical Edition reflects. An extensive "Contexts" section includes maps, photographs, and documents showing how and why Alger used the backdrop of New York...

London has provided the setting and inspiration for a host of literary works in English, from canonical masterpieces to the popular and ephemeral. Drawing upon a variety of methods and materials, the essays in this volume explore the London of Langland...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780385492287Author Robert DrakeFormat PaperbackPage Count 476Imprint Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing GroupPublisher Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781420974720Author AristotleFormat PaperbackPage Count 36Imprint Digireads.comPublisher Digireads.comWeight(grams) 59gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 2mm

First Published in 1984. This book was born out of a disagreement among friends. Paul Rabinow, attending a seminar given in 1979 by Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle which concerned, among other things, Michel Foucault, objected to the characterization of...

The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry provides historical context on the evolution of the Latin American poetic tradition from the sixteenth century to the present day. It is organized into three parts. Part I provides a comprehensive,...

Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions,...

This collection of specially-commissioned essays by experts in the field explores key dimensions of Edgar Allan Poe's work and life. Contributions provide a series of alternative perspectives on one of the most enigmatic and controversial American...

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love,...

The fourteen distinguished contributors to this volume explore ways we tell, understand, and use stories. More important, through their exploration they collectively demonstrate that the study of narrative, like the study of other significant human...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814258088Author Marco CaraccioloFormat PaperbackPage Count 230Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University Press

A fascinating look into the myths that continue to shape our understanding and appreciation of Jane Austen. Was Jane Austen the best-selling novelist of her time? Are all her novels romances? Did they depict the traditional world of the aristocracy? Is...

"Backgrounds and Sources" includes central passages from the letters of Tolstoy and his correspondents, S. A. Tolstoy's diaries, and contemporary accounts translated by George Gibian exclusively for this Norton Critical Edition. Together these materials...