Literary Criticism

Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to...

Alex Capus follows every step of Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, studying every clue left behind by the Scottish writer and reaching his own conclusion about the most dramatic turn in Stevenson's life: his decision to settle in Samoa, where the...

Including more than 30 essential works of science fiction criticism in a single volume, this is a comprehensive introduction to the study of this enduringly popular genre. Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings covers such topics...

Evaluating Emily Dickinson's poetry within the context of Romanticism, Joanne Diehl demonstrates how the poet both manifests and boldly subverts this literary tradition. One of the most important reasons for the poet's divergence from it, Professor Diehl...

This timely introduction to Old English literature focuses on the production and reception of Old English texts, and on their relation to Anglo-Saxon history and culture. Introduces Old English texts and considers their relation to Anglo-Saxon culture...

For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist solely as meter, stanzas, or rhyme scheme. Rather, the form of a poem emerged as an experience, one generated when an audience immersed in a culture of dance encountered a poetic text. Exploring the...

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook offers students and scholars a rich variety of interpretations from which to fashion their own views of the novel and the man who created it. Both Ellison's comments, a number of which appear in print here for...

Epistolary fictions.The Letters of Alciphron (second century AD) constitute one of the most attractive products of the Second Sophistic. They are fictitious compositions based on an astonishingly wide variety of circumstances, though the theme of erotic...

Vergil's Aeneid has been considered a classic, if not the classic, of Western literature for two thousand years. In recent decades this famous poem has become the subject of fresh and searching controversy. What is the poem's fundamental meaning? Does it...

One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later...

Bloodhoof is a compulsively modern recasting of the ancient Eddic poem Skirnimal - a minimalist epic telling of the abduction of Gerdur Gymisdottir from a land of giants and her eventual return from the court of Freyr with her beloved son. The journey is...

Fictional character is an ontologically ambivalent category -- at once a formal construct and a quasi-person -- which lies at the heart of the life of textual fictions of all kinds. Character and Person explores that ambivalence by investigating not only...

This book explores how recollections and traces of the reign of Richard III survived a century and more to influence the world and work of William Shakespeare. In Richard III, Shakespeare depicts an era that had only recently passed beyond the horizon of...

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned,...

From the forests of the tales of the Brothers Grimm to Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree, from the flowers of Cicely May Barker's fairies to the treehouse in Andy Griffith and Terry Denton's popular 13-Storey Treehouse series, trees and other plants have...

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by...

Poetry: A Survivor's Guide has earned high praise from students, teachers, and readers from around the globe for its playful sincerity and idiosyncratic humor and for its approach to a subject both loved and feared. Updated and expanded, including six...

The Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then, however, they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever...

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 ...

A study of numerology in Elizabethan poetry, with some background studies which base the subject in classical learning, the works of Dante and Petrarch, and the esoteric traditions of the humanists. The central assumption of numerological criticism is...

Catullus, who lived during some of the most interesting and tumultuous years of the late Roman Republic, spent his short but intense life (?84-54 B.C.E.) in high Roman society, rubbing shoulders with various cultural and political luminaries, including...

Having found his translators, may Callimachus now find the public he deserves. -D.S. Carne-RossA Poundian figure who summed up the possibilties of a new era's response to an old and rich poetic tradition, Callimachus (ca. 305 B.C.-ca. 240 B.C.) was the...

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marked the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century. The book's three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poem. "The Poetry of Constancy:...

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne Anlin Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity. The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is...

Reasoning is the critical thinking skill concerned with the production of arguments: making them coherent, consistent, and well-supported; and responding to opposing positions where necessary. The Better Angels of Our Nature offers a step-by-step class...

The "Continuum Contemporaries" series is designed to be a source of ideas and inspiration for members of book clubs and reading groups, as well as for literature students at school, college and university. The series aims to give readers...

The Poems of Browning is the first collected edition to be based on the earliest printed texts, and to present these texts in order of their composition.Together, volumes I and II provide an authoritative and accessible tribute to this great poet. Volume...

Claude Levi-Strauss is probably the most complex anthropological theorist of all time. His work continues to influence present-day thinkers in his field, but he is perhaps even more influential beyond it. As one of the key figures in the development of...

Comedy created a joyful mode of perceiving rhetoric, grammar, and literary criticism through the somatic senses of the author, the characters, the actors and the spectators. This was due to generic peculiarities including the omnivore mirroring of...

At the heart of The Land's Wild Music is an examination of the relationship between writers and their. Interviewing four great American writers of place Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin author Mark Tredinnick...

"The book is a credit to the press, a boon to everyone interested in Russian culture, and an important resource for teachers and students of Russian literature." -Library Journal" . . . a solid and conscientious piece of work, informed by discerning...

Do words-their sounds and shapes, their lengths and patterns-imitate the world? Mimology says they do. First argued in Plato's Cratylus more than two thousand years ago, mimology has left an important mark in virtually every major art and artistic theory...

In twelfth-century Constantinople, writers worked on commission for the imperial family or aristocratic patrons. Texts were occasioned by specific events, representing both a link between writer and patron and between literary imagination and empirical...

When critical theory met literary studies in the 1970s and '80s, some of the most radical and exciting theoretical work centred on the quasi-sacred figure of Shakespeare. In Alternative Shakespeares, John Drakakis brought together key essays by founding...

"Quite simply: these are seminal essays. . . . Distinguished scholarship, erudite, and full of innovative ways of interpreting Arabic and Persian poetry." -Omar Pound"[This book] reads Arabic and Persian poetry in a refreshingly new and significant way. ...

"We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little precision in matters of the soul."--Robert Musil Best known as author of the novel The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil wrote these essays in Vienna and Berlin between 1911 and...

Before publishing Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, Baudelaire was probably better known to his contemporaries as a critic than as a poet, and the articles translated here by P. E. Charvet illustrate the development of Baudelaire's critical ideas. The essays...

What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious...

In this 2001 book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siecle. Thurschwell argues that technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid-nineteenth century on: they...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, rural populations throughout Europe changed the language they used in everyday life, abandoning their traditional vernaculars-such as French patois, local Italian dialects, and the Irish language-in favor of...