Literary Criticism

Love's Madness makes an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, Helen Small presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the...

To those who think they know what George Orwell is all about, this book unpacks surprise after surprise. Orwell Your Orwell reveals an Orwell very different from the one most people think of. It gives an unexpected yet convincing picture of Orwell's...

In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in...

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679773498Author Paris ReviewFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 316gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the worldEnglish has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern...

For many people in early modern England the Reformation turned the past into another country: the 'merry world'. Nostalgia for this imaginary time, both widespread and widely contested, was commodified by a burgeoning entertainment industry. This book...

These essays discuss various ontological and epistemological questions in moral philosophy, drawing on ideas from Platonic-Aristotelian ethics, the later Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch, though without seeking to weave these into any unified system. The...

The first full-length study of incest in the Gothic genre, this book argues that Gothic writers resisted the power structures of their society through incestuous desires. It provides interdisciplinary readings of incest within father-daughter, sibling,...

'informative, succint, circumspect; an exacting introduction to Leavis as an incisive master critic. Ideal for today's students and general readers' - Chris Terry, Times Higher EducationF.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary...

'The power of Shakespeare lies in his evidently conscious knowledge, skill and understanding of how to work with the alchemical potential in the human soul in the crafting of his plays. Each play is made as an exquisitely unique transformative device for...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910170052Author John MartinFormat PaperbackPage Count 296Imprint Five Leaves PublicationsPublisher Five Leaves Publications

From Dr. Moreau's Beast People to David Cronenberg's Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem's robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler's human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of...

"Against Theory," the title essay in this volume, challenges the notion that literary theory has any real work to do, or any results to show. This challenge-issued by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Critical Inquiry (8:4)-strikes some critics as...

The first comprehensive study of Calderon in English Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681) is one of the most important dramatists - many would say the single most important dramatist - of the Spanish Golden Age. Spain's dominant and most prestigious...

With its contextualizing introduction, notes, and gloss, this edition makes the Prose Merlin available to any student of Arthurian legend, no matter their level of proficiency in Middle English. Written in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the...

It was one of the most popular novels of the nineteenth century and Tolstoy called it "the greatest of all novels." Yet today Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is neglected by readers and undervalued by critics. In The Temptation of the Impossible, one of the...

Two racy Greek romances.In Longus' ravishing Daphnis and Chloe (second or early third century AD), one of the great works of world literature, an innocent boy and girl gradually discover their sexuality in an idealized pastoral environment. In Xenophon's...

The Logic of Love in The Canterbury Tales argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's magnum opus draws inventively on the resources of late medieval logic to conceive of love as an "insoluble." Philosophers of the fourteenth century expended great effort to solve...

Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of...

The Politics of Home examines the changing representations of "home" in twentieth-century English literature. Examining imperial fiction, contemporary literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial narratives on belonging, exile and immigration, Rosemary...

A Companion to Virginia Woolf is a thorough examination of her life, work, and multiple contexts in 33 essays written by leading scholars in the field. Contains insightful and provocative new scholarship and sketches out new directions for future...

"How tame and manageable are the emotions of our bards, how placid and literary their allusions!" complained essayist T. W. Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly in 1870. "The American poet of passion is yet to come." He was, of course, unaware of the great...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781614980902Author S T JoshiFormat PaperbackPage Count 374Imprint Hippocampus PressPublisher Hippocampus Press

Marie de France, perhaps the finest medieval short fiction writer before Chaucer, composed her lais (short verse stories that resemble fairy tales) sometime between 1160 and 1199. The translators introduce and interpret each tale.Book InformationISBN...

From Shakespeare's 'green-eyed monster' to the 'green thought in a green shade' in Andrew Marvell's "The Garden," the color green was curiously prominent and resonant in English culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among other things,...

Company was first composed in English over two years, with Beckett breaking a 20-year-long pattern of composing primarily in French to craft this meticulously structured 59-paragraph masterpiece of his late prose. Its French companion, Compagnie, was...

An edition of Milton's later work rk includes the text of six books of Paradise Lost, The History of Britain and the whole of Samson Agonistes. Through his introduction, commmentary and full annotations, Tony Davies sets the works in their political and...

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas...

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is a comprehensive overview of the history and study of science fiction. It outlines major writers, movements, and texts in the genre, established critical approaches and areas for future study. Fifty-six...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsCommended for Christianity Today Book Award (Culture) 2016.Book InformationISBN 9780802869364Author Don W. KingFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint William B Eerdmans...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781909747449Author Wilfred OwenFormat PaperbackPage Count 48Imprint Two Rivers PressPublisher Two Rivers Press

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...

Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing - for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between...

The literary friendship between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes lasted 25 years. Everything attests to their deep and mutual intellectual esteem: their private correspondence, their published texts, their conversations - notably in the famous...

Focusing on intermediality, The Material Image situates film within questions of representation familiar from the other arts: What is meant by figuring the real? How is the real suggested by visual metaphors, and what is its relation to illusion? How is...

Few works of literature are as familiar and beloved as The Arabian Nights. Yet few remain also as unknown. In English, The Arabian Nights is a literary work of relatively recent date-the first versions of the tales appeared in English barely two hundred...

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, she was the bestselling mystery writer in history. This collection of new essays brings fresh perspectives to Christie scholarship with new readings and discussions of little-known aspects of her life, career and...

In the long nineteenth century, scientists discovered striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the 'ingenious' experiments of Daines Barrington to the...

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066-1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware...