Literary Criticism

Laughter in stitches.The era of Old Comedy (ca. 485 - ca. 380 BC), when theatrical comedy was created and established, is best known through the extant plays of Aristophanes, but there were many other poets whose comedies survive only in fragments. ...

In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies, editors Maureen ORourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs and a selection of...

Sooner or later, our words take on meanings other than we intended. How Words Make Things Happen suggests that the conventional idea of persuasive rhetoric (which assumes a speaker's control of calculated effects) and the modern idea of literary autonomy...

From vampire apocalypses, shark attacks, witches, and ghosts, to murderous dolls bent on revenge, horror has been part of the American cinematic imagination for almost as long as pictures have moved on screens. But why do they captive us so? What is the...

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most inventive and important contemporary writers. Also adapted as a film, his novel Enduring Love (1997) is a tale of obsession that has both troubled and enthralled readers around the world. Renowned author Peter Childs...

In No Standard Oil, environmental policy expert Deborah Gordon examines the widely varying climate impacts of global oils and gases, and proposes solutions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in this sector while making sustainable progress in transitioning...

The texts that comprise this volume were selected from Helene Cixous's seminars on the work of Clarice Lispector. They reflect Cixous's own meditations on problems of reading and writing, and on related themes such as exchange and the gift, love and...

Ecocriticism, a theoretical movement examining cultural constructions of Nature in their social and political contexts, is making an increasingly important contribution to our understanding of Shakespeare's plays. Gabriel Egan's Green Shakespeare...

Through staging dialogues between scholars, activists, and artists from a variety of disciplinary, geographical, and historical specializations, Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues explores the possible resonances and dissonances between the...

A collection of the essays of art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, which explores his thoughts on individual contemporary artists, their work, events and ethics in the art world and new, creative directions.About the AuthorPeter Schjeldahl is art critic...

Narratology in Practice opens up the well-known theory of narrative to various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Written as a companion to Mieke Bal's international classic Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, in which...

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of...

Now in paperback!MorganteThe Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend MorganteLuigi PulciTranslated by Joseph TusianiIntroduction and Notes by Edoardo A. Lebano"Pulci's Morgante is a multilayered text... so rich in witticisms, ribaldry, and word...

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It...

Originally published in 1976. In The Romantic Sublime Thomas Weiskel investigates the concept of the sublime in the poetry of English Romantic writers. His work infuses elements of structuralism and psychological thought in his attempt to describe and...

Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that...

Contemporary Literature and the Body: a Critical Introduction introduces readers to key theorists and shifting critical trends in the field from 1940 to the present and examines these in relation to close readings of texts from a range of different...

This book marks a critical intervention in the medical humanities that takes issue with its understanding of empathy as something that one has.Book InformationISBN 9781474452410Author Anne WhiteheadFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Edinburgh...

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 ...

"The people are missing" is a constant refrain in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's writings after the 1975 publication of Kafka: Pour une litterature mineure. With the translation of this work into English (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature) in 1986,...

Neil Cornwell's study, while endeavouring to present an historical survey of absurdist literature and its forbears, does not aspire to being an exhaustive history of absurdism. Rather, it pauses on certain historical moments, artistic movements, literary...

Casting a critical eye on comic works throughout the ages, Meredith finds that the most skilled masters of the comic art-Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding, Moliere-used comedy to grasp the essence of humanity. Comedy, according to...

The French Revolution ignited the biggest debate on politics and society in Britain since the Civil War 150 years earlier. The public controversy lasted from the initial, positive reaction to French events in 1789 to the outlawing of the radical...

What is fanfiction, and what is it not? Why does fanfiction matter? And what makes it so important to the future of literature? Fic is a groundbreaking exploration of the history and culture of fan writing and what it means for the way we think about...

This collection explores British attitudes to Continental Europe that explain the Brexit decision. Addressing British-European entanglements and the impact of British Euroscepticism, the book argues that Britain is in denial about the strength of its...

The Cloud of Unknowing describes the contemplative method centered around eliminating all noise and images from the mind, and in that encounter with nothingness, finding God. Meanwhile, despite the austerity of the content, the style of the author is...

Music, Words and Voice: A Reader is a new and exciting interdisciplinary resource which integrates the worlds of music and literature. It is the first primary and secondary source collection of its kind to focus on the relationships between words and...

Cicero's dialogues De oratore (On the Orator) and De re publica (On the Commonwealth), composed between 55 and 51 BCE, examine two topics central to Roman public life: the role of the orator in society and the importance of honorable statesmanship for...

Octavia E. Butler is widely recognized today as one of the most important figures in contemporary science fiction. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering Butler's complete works from the bestselling novel Kindred, to her short...

Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the...

Ted Hughes wrote in a wide range of modes which were informed by an even wider range of contexts to which his lifetime's reading, interests and experience gave him access. The achievement of Ted Hughes as one of the major poets of the twentieth century...

'Another world must be unfurled, Another language known'Best known - and beloved - for her highly popular novels including Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen was also an accomplished, and often witty, poet:'I am going to...

The Stranger is a rite of passage for readers around the world. Since its publication in France in 1942, Camus's novel has been translated into sixty languages and sold more than six million copies. It's the rare novel that's as at likely to be found in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781873982020Author Brian O. MurdochFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Dedalus LtdPublisher Dedalus Ltd

Theories of Memory provides a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly expanding field of memory studies. It is a resource through which students will be able both to broaden their knowledge of contemporary theoretical perspectives and trace the...

Virginia Woolf once commented that the central image in Robinson Crusoe is an object - a large earthenware pot. Woolf and other critics pointed out that early modern prose is full of things but bare of setting and description. Explaining how the empty,...

A girl sits on a sofa, not knowing what to do with herself. She argues with her mother and envies her older sister. She also longs for her absent father, a seaman. A middle-aged woman paints a portrait of herself as a young girl, sitting on a sofa, but...

This short history of Shakespeare in global performance-from the re-opening of London theatres upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to our present multicultural day-provides a comprehensive overview of Shakespeare's theatrical afterlife and...

In Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages, Michelle Karnes revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period's meditations and theories of cognition. Karnes here understands imagination in...

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...