Literary Criticism

Headstrong heroines and hot-tempered chieftains, loch monsters and hill fairies, cattle raids and clan feuds, wise animals and foolish saints: the Scottish Highlands' folktales date back centuries and preserve the history and beliefs of a people deeply...

A reevaluation of Edouard Glissant that centers on the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and creates deep, original theories of trauma and Caribbeanness While philosophy has undertaken the work of accounting for Europe's traumatic history, the field has...

In this first full-length study of the war veteran in literature, Kate McLoughlin draws new critical attention to a figure central to national life. Offering fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical works, she shows how authors from William...

In recent years Purcell's biography has received a good deal of attention, but there has been little writing on his music; indeed, this book provides the first general survey since Sir Jack Westrup's 1937 volume in the Master Musicians series...

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (circa. 500 B.C.-428 B.C.) was reportedly the first Presocratic philosopher to settle in Athens. He was a friend of Pericles and his ideas are reflected in the works of Sophocles and Aristophanes. Anaxagoras asserted that Mind is...

Why did no one read Sonnet 18 for over one hundred years? What traumatic memories did Sonnet 111 conjure up for Charles Dickens? Which Sonnet did Wilfred Owen find particularly offensive on the WW1 battlefront? What kind of love does Sonnet 116 celebrate...

The poet David Gascoyne (1916-2001) led a life as surreal as his early poems. At eighteen he drafted the manifesto of the English Surrealist Group and at nineteen he published what remains an authoritative account of the international movement. He...

This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the...

During his lifetime, Robert Frost notoriously resisted collecting his prose--going so far as to halt the publication of one prepared compilation and to "lose" the transcripts of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1936. But for...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781606999332Author Tom SpurgeonFormat HardbackPage Count 500Imprint FantagraphicsPublisher Fantagraphics

How the otherworldly worlds created by the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy speak to-and even affect-our own If ever a moment and a writer were made for each other, that time is now and Jeff VanderMeer is that writer. Reaching more and more readers...

This volume, the fourth of five planned in Joseph Frank's widely acclaimed biography of Dostoevsky, covers the six most remarkably productive years in the novelist's entire career. It was in this short span of time that Dostoevsky produced three of his...

Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street-already a synonym for impoverished hack writers-before he became one of literary London's most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells...

This title offers an introduction to the political and historical context to Shakespeare's tragedy and history plays, written in an accessible, jargon-free style."Shakespeare's Politics" is an invaluable introduction to the political world of...

Originally published in 1983, this volume follows others in the series. The user is provided with a Verbal Index, citing each type and its location, a Word Frequency Table, and a Field of Reference. This volume is part of a series which produced verbal...

What to read next is every book lover's greatest dilemma. Nancy Pearl comes to the rescue with this wide-ranging and fun guide to the best reading new and old. Pearl, who inspired legions of litterateurs with "What If All (name the city) Read the Same...

For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works...

Why did hagiographers of the late Middle Ages praise mothers for abandoning small children? How did a group of female mystics come to define themselves as "apostles to the dead" and end by challenging God's right to damn? Why did certain heretics around...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781612197791Author Ursula Le GuinFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Melville House PublishingPublisher Melville House Publishing

Animal Alterity uses readings of science fiction texts to explore the centrality of animals for our ways of thinking about human. It argues that the academic field of animal studies and the popular genre of science fiction share a number a critical...

'A serious work of theory.' The Guardian 'Jonathan Allan has come up with a whole theory of the arsehole.' Dazed and Confused In a resolute deviation from the governing totality of the phallus, Reading from Behind offers a radical reorientation...

Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In Automatic Woman, Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightful analyses...

A unique intersection between periodical and literary scholarship, and class and gender history, this book showcases a brand-new approach to surveying a popular domestic magazine. Reading Woman's Weekly alongside titles including Good Housekeeping, My...

Elza Adamowicz presents an analysis of surrealist collage, both as a technique of cutting and pasting ready made material, and as a subversive and creative strategy. She considers verbal collage, pictorial collage, and the hybrids they generate, and...

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the...

Henri Michaux defies common critical definition. Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux "genius," and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux's work "is without equal in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is the environment, this elusive object that impacts us so profoundly--our odds to be born; the way we look, feel, and function; and how...

Basic Elements of Narrative outlines a way of thinking about what narrative is and how to identify its basic elements across various media, introducing key concepts developed by previous theorists and contributing original ideas to the growing body of...

Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned "mother tongue" about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within...

Terry Eagleton occupies a unique position in the English-speaking world today. He is not only a productive literary theorist, but also a novelist and playwright. He remains a committed socialist deeply hostile to the zeitgeist. Over the last forty years...

After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, to parts of Latin America and the Pacific Rim. With the Bandung Conference...

Standard literary criticism tends to either ignore or downplay the unorthodox tradition of black experimental writing that emerged in the wake of protests against colonization and Jim Crow-era segregation. Histories of African American literature...

The Henry VI plays are Shakespeare's earliest, most theatrically exciting plays and in their day, they were among his most popular works. In a story which stretches over thirty years, Shakespeare dramatises the fall of the House of Lancaster and creates...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781908980236Author Nicola RoyanFormat PaperbackPage Count 394Imprint Scottish Literature InternationalPublisher Association for Scottish Literary...

A clear introduction to the idea of the canon, exploring the process by which certain works, and not others, receive high cultural status. The work of Shakespeare and Aphra Behn is used to illustrate and challenge this process.Book InformationISBN...

Though most historians remember her as the mistress of Voltaire, Emilie Du Chatelet (1706-49) was an accomplished writer in her own right, who published multiple editions of her scientific writings during her lifetime, as well as a translation of...

This volume explores the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and seeks to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is the 'common' in...

What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? Show me the money documents how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in...

The most complete corpus of the proverbs and fables of Aesop ever assembledBen Edwin Perry's Aesopica remains the definitive edition of all fables reputed to be by Aesop. The volume begins traditionally with a life of Aesop, but in two different and...

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill', it demonstrates that modernism is, on the...