Literary Criticism

In the midst of the climate crisis and the threat of the sixth extinction, we can no longer claim to be the masters of nature. Rather, we need to unlearn our species' arrogance for the sake of all animals, human and non-human. Rethinking our...

"Robert Hatten's new book is a worthy successor to his Musical Meaning in Beethoven, which established him as a front-rank scholar . . . in questions of musical meaning. . . . [B]oth how he approaches musical works and what he says about them are timely...

Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international...

This new critical volume, the second to appear in the three-volume "Lectura Dantis", contains expert, focused commentary on the Purgatorio by thirty-three international scholars, each of whom presents to the nonspecialist reader one of the cantos of the...

This book offers the intelligent new reader a critically evaluative guide to Keats's major poems and letters, from a perspective which aims to counter the historical emphasis of recent critical workAbout the AuthorKelvin Everest is Bradley Professor of...

In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of homosexual desire. Smith...

More than a hundred years ago, Freud made a new mythology by revising an old one: Oedipus, in Sophocles' tragedy the legendary perpetrator of shocking crimes, was an Everyman whose story of incest and parricide represented the fulfilment of universal and...

Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these "confessions," the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and...

In the mid-nineteenth century, thirty-six expeditions set out for the Northwest Passage in search of Sir John Franklin's missing expedition. The array of visual and textual material produced on these voyages was to have a profound impact on the idea of...

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It...

Our Common Future is a joint work produced in 1987 by a United Nations commission headed by former Norwegian Prime Minister, Gro Brundtland. Also known as The Brundtland Report, it offers a classic approach to problem solving by first asking a productive...

This genealogy of the 'odd woman' compares representations of spinsters, lesbians and widows in British women's fiction and auto/biography from the 1850s to the 1930s.Women outside heterosexual marriage in this period were seen as abnormal, superfluous,...

The contributors to Territories and Trajectories propose a model of cultural production and transmission based on the global diffusion, circulation, and exchange of people, things, and ideas across time and space. This model eschews a static,...

On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet,...

The Roman epic retelling of the quest for the golden fleece.Valerius Flaccus, Gaius, Latin poet who flourished in the period ca. AD 70-90, composed in smooth and sometimes obscure style an incomplete epic Argonautica in eight books, on the auest for the...

The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. "For almost...

A footprint materializes mysteriously on a deserted shore; a giant helmet falls from the sky; a traveler awakens to find his horse dangling from a church steeple. Eighteenth-century fiction brims with moments such as these, in which the prosaic rubs up...

Recent scholarship concerning parish priests in medieval England, their professional training, and their daily pastoral work has produced a more complex and realistic picture of parish clergy in the High and Late Middle Ages which dispels many of the...

'About the AuthorCatherine Porter is Professor of French at State University of New York College at Cortland.Book InformationISBN 9780801480867Author Gerard GenetteFormat PaperbackPage Count 168Imprint Cornell University PressPublisher Cornell University...

Almost immediately after jazz became popular nationally in the United States in the early 20th century, American writers responded to what this exciting art form signified for listeners. This book takes an expansive view of the relationship between this...

This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known...

Poetic elegies for lost or fallen cities are seemingly as old as cities themselves. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this genre finds its purest expression in the book of Lamentations, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem; in Arabic, this genre is...

Rural Modernity in Britain argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much if not more than urban and suburban areas.Book InformationISBN 9781474473187Author Kristin BluemelFormat PaperbackPage Count 328Imprint...

A new perspective on a book that transformed Victorian illustration into a stand-alone art. Edward Moxon's 1857 edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems dramatically redefined the relationship between images and words in print. Cooke's study, the...

The more the global north has learned about the existential threat of climate change, the faster it has emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change, Lee Zimmerman thinks about why this is by examining how...

Terry Pratchett's writing celebrates the possibilities opened up by inventiveness and imagination. It constructs an ethical stance that values informed and self-aware choices, knowledge of the world in which one makes those choices, the importance of...

This groundbreaking study explores the later lives and late-life writings of more than two dozen British women authors active during the long eighteenth century. Drawing on biographical materials, literary texts, and reception histories, Devoney Looser...

This introduction to studying comics and graphic novels is a structured guide to a popular topic. It deploys new cognitive methods of textual analysis and features activities and exercises throughout. * Deploys novel cognitive approaches to analyze the...

From one of today's keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the two Adam Kirsch is one of today's finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the...

From the bestselling Bridget Jones's Diary that started the trend to the television sensation Sex and the Citythat captured it on screen, "chick lit" has become a major pop culture phenomenon. Banking on female audiences' identification with single,...

Since its inception, the Nobel Prize for literature has given a very public voice to some of the world's greatest writers, and their responses to the honor--their acceptance speeches--have often been epochal. From the famed call to arms by William...

Once a controversial genre of Victorian fiction that produced the major best sellers of its century, the now-forgotten sensation novel was a publishing phenomenon in its time. In a vivid portrait of this subversive and discomfiting popular literature,...

Bringing to the fore the voices of Maya authors and what their poetry tells us about resistance, sovereignty, trauma, and regeneration In 1954, Guatemala suffered a coup d'etat, resulting in a decades-long civil war. During this period, Indigenous Mayans...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781560976967Author Tom SpurgeonFormat PaperbackPage Count 360Imprint FantagraphicsPublisher FantagraphicsWeight(grams) 488g

Achilles-warrior and hero-by the protocols of Western culture, should never cry. And yet Homeric epic is full of his tears and those of his companions at Troy. This path-blazing study by Helene Monsacre shows how later ideals of stoically inexpressive...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780593230015Author Chika SagawaFormat PaperbackPage Count 144Imprint Modern Library IncPublisher Random House USA Inc

As poet, critic, theorist and teacher, Charles Olson extended the possibilities of modern writing. From Call Me Ishmael, his pioneering study of Herman Melville, to his epic poetic project The Maximus Poems, Olson probed the relation between language,...

In The Feeling of Kinship, David L. Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism"-the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States, economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and...

In the last fifty years Irish poets have produced some of the most exciting poetry in contemporary literature, writing about love and sexuality, violence and history, country and city. This book, first published in 2003, provides an introduction to major...

Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today. Louise Erdrich has shaped the possibilities for Native American, women's and popular fiction in the...