Literary Criticism

In this volume, readers experience, in English translation, the colorful and varied textual fabric of the most important literary and creative repertory of the Middle Ages. The public, organized worship of the Church had a central role in medieval life...

One of the founders of literary realism and the serial novel, Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was a prolific writer who produced more than a hundred novels, plays and short stories during his career. With its dramatic plots and memorable characters,...

The Poetry Book Society Autumn 2018 Recommended Translation. Asked to name the great Latin love poets, today's reader is likely to offer Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Horace. Propertius, a successor of the first and influential peer to the others, has not...

The Modes of Modern Writing tackles some of the fundamental questions we all encounter when studying or reading literature, such as: what is literature? What is realism? What is relationship between form and content? And what dictates the shifts in...

This volume of fourteen essays offers fresh insight into the life and work of Muriel Spark (1918–2006), one of Scotland’s most internationally celebrated writers. Known for her cultural cosmopolitanism and sharp wit, Spark was prolific as a novelist,...

Music of a Distant Drum marks a literary milestone. It collects 129 poems from the four leading literary traditions of the Middle East, all masterfully translated into English by Bernard Lewis, many for the first time. These poems come from diverse...

How, Barbara Newman asks, did the myth of the separable heart take such a firm hold in the Middle Ages, from lovers exchanging hearts with one another to mystics exchanging hearts with Jesus? What special traits gave both saints and demoniacs their...

"Reading on Location" is a country-by-country guide to the regions and cities made famous by both well-known and cult books. From the quintessential English city of Bath, featured in Jane Austen's "Persuasion" to the South India of Arundhati Roy's "The...

Scholars at dinner.In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century AD) is amusing reading and of ...

Russia's size, the diversity of its peoples and its unique geographical position straddling East and West have created a culture that is both inward and outward looking. Its history reflects the tension between very different approaches to what culture...

Edition and translation of this important genre of Old Welsh poetry. The "Stanzas of the Graves" or "Graves of the Warriors of the Island of Britain", attributed to the legendary poet Taliesin, describe ancient heroes' burial places. Like the "Triads of...

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A Companion to Shakespeare is an indispensable book for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays. Contains 28 newly commissioned essays written by the most distinguished historians and literary...

In this ground-breaking book, Alison Milbank explains why a comprehension of the Victorian reception of Dante is essential for a full understanding of Victorianism as a whole. Her focus on this much-neglected topic allows her to reconfigure the British...

Slow to rise in the literary world, Octavia Estelle Butler cultivated musings on earth's future, reaching massive critical acclaim in the process. This companion will complement book club discussions and classroom lessons for the closest possible...

A. T. Moore's thorough commentary on "Love's Sacrifice" is designed to be of use to all kinds of readers, from students of Early Modern drama to specialists in the field. The notes provide full explanations of obscure words and phrases, and offer...

Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of...

Jean-Francois Lyotard is one of the most celebrated proponents of what has become known as the 'postmodern'. More than almost any other contemporary theorist, he has explored the relations between knowledge, art, politics and history, in ways that offer...

Casting fresh light on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, literature, ecological science and paganism, Decadent Ecology reveals the pervasive influence of decadence and paganism on modern understandings of nature and the...

Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation...

Here are graceful and timeless poems by one of Japan's greatest modern writers, rendered by a master translator. Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) is credited with modernizing Japan's two traditional verse forms, haiku and tanka. Born at a time of social and...

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this study examines the different representations of women in the Odyssey and their significance within the context of the poem and Greek culture. A central theme of the book is the visualization of the Odyssey's...

This Companion provides an introduction to the craft of prose. It considers the technical aspects of style that contribute to the art of prose, examining the constituent parts of prose through a widening lens, from the smallest details of punctuation and...

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...

The story of the music that accompanies the cinematic adventures of Ian Fleming's intrepid Agent 007 is one of surprising real-life drama. In The Music of James Bond, author Jon Burlingame throws open studio and courtroom doors alike to reveal the full...

Undergraduates frequently find the fine Old English poem JUDITH the most stimulating of the surviving texts from the Anglo-Saxon period. In the past thirty years it has attracted a wide range of literary criticism both in the UK and the US. Feminist...

This book argues that Freud's mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients' symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients'...

Little attention has been focused the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study focuses Muslims in several core texts representing drama, epic, and...

Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on...

This is the new edition of bestselling introductory text outlining the history and ways of reading Gothic literature. This revised edition includes a new chapter on Contemporary Gothic which explores the Gothic of the early twentieth century and looks at...

Fresh examinations of the manuscript which is one of the chief compendiums of literature in the Middle English period. Created in London c. 1340, the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1) is of crucial...

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published her landmark work, The Yellow Wall-Paper, generating spirited debates in literary and political circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Today this story of a young wife and mother succumbing to madness is hailed...

As England entered the Renaissance and as humanism, with its focus on classical literature and philosophy, informed the educational system, English intellectuals engaged in a concerted effort to remake the culture, language, manners-indeed, the whole...

Who's Who in Dickens is an accessible guide to the many characters in Charles Dickens' fiction. Dickens' characters are strikingly portrayed and have become a vital part of our cultural heritage - Scrooge has become a by-word for stinginess, Uriah Heep...

If every writer necessarily draws on their own life, is any writing outside the realm of 'autobiography'? The new edition of this classic guide is fully updated to include:developments in autobiographical criticism, highlighting major theoretical issues...

This book examines the literary and intellectual relationships between "Piers Plowman" and "The Faerie Queene". It links these two rich and problematical poems by showing their development from a common religious and artistic matrix...

Rudyard Kipling has been described as 'one of the few complete originals in English literature'. In his last work, Something of Myself, he reflects on his life and the basis of his art. Yet paradoxically this ostensibly autobiographical work (as an early...

One of the most intriguing questions of our time is how some of the masterpieces of modernity originated in a country in which personal liberty and democracy were slow to emerge. This Companion provides an authoritative account of modern German culture...

A bunch of truly ap-peeling things to do with this fruit basket staple. If you've ever had a surplus of bananas and way too much time on your hands, you'll know that this playful yellow hero is much more versatile...

Dwight F. Reynolds brings together a collection of essays by leading international scholars to provide a comprehensive and accessible survey of modern Arab culture, from the early nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The chapters survey key issues...