Literary Criticism

Liz Lochhead is one of the country's leading poets. Her work has paved the way and inspired some of the most inspirational voices writing in Scotland today, including Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy. In A Handsel, the first...

The Age of Revolutions and its aftermath is unparalleled in English literature. Its poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; its novelists, Jane Austen and Scott. But how is it that some of these writers were apparently...

This prose translation of the Odyssey is so successful that it has taken its place as one of the few really outstanding versions of Homer's famous epic poem. It is the story of the return of Odysseus from the siege of Troy to his home in Ithaca, and of...

This is the OCR-endorsed edition covering the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription of Tacitus Annals XII, 25-26, 41-43, 52-53, 56-59, 64-69, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction. It is AD 48 and the...

This AQA AS and A Level English Literature A Student Book prepares students and teachers for the requirements of the AQA A Level English Literature specification. Structured and written to build on skills students acquired at GCSE, this book helps...

Shakespeare's Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater. A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater...

This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1985 corrected text and is accompanied by newly updated and expanded explanatory annotations and an introduction by Michael Gorra. "Backgrounds and Contexts" is divided into three sections, each of which...

Diana Gabaldon has captivated millions of readers with her critically acclaimed Outlander novels. In this beautifully illustrated compendium, Diana Gabaldon opens a door through the standing stones and offers a guided tour of what lies within...

From popular histories through to reworkings of classical subject matter by contemporary poets, dramatists, and novelists, the classical world and the masterpieces of its literature continue to fascinate readers and audiences in a huge variety of media...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780140714661Author William ShakespeareFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Penguin Random House AustraliaPublisher Penguin Random House...

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's enduringly popular comedy. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique edition presents a historical overview of The Merry Wives of Windsor in...

E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is an innovative and effusive treatise on a literary form that, at the time of publication, had only recently begun to enjoy serious academic consideration. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction...

A gathering of poetic blossoms.The Greek Anthology (literally, "Gathering of Flowers") is the name given to a collection of about 4500 short Greek poems (called epigrams but usually not epigrammatic) by about 300 composers. To the collection (called...

This biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written with reference to Browning correspondence only recently available, argues that the poet was a strong and determined woman largely responsible for her own incarceration in Wimpole Street. The author...

Arranged in a handy A-Z format, A Dictionary of Tolkien explores and explains the creatures, plants, events and places that make up these strange and wonderful lands. It is essential reading for anyone who loves Tolkien's works and wants to learn...

'With fair-tressed Demeter, the sacred goddess, my song begins, With herself and her slim-ankled daughter, whom Aidoneus once Abducted...' Most people are familiar, at least by repute, with the two great epics of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey,...

Poetry, arguably, has a greater range of conceptual meaning than perhaps any other term in English. At the most basic level everyone can recognise it--it is a kind of literature that uses special linguistic devices of organization and expression for...

'A pointed, svelte but diverse work.' Irish TimesPart memoir, part manifesto, Some Answers Without Questions is an elegant, important and spirited work of self-investigation; the result of decades of answering questions that don't really matter-and not...

'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781496425805Author Sarah ClarksonFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Tyndale House PublishersPublisher Tyndale House Publishers

The work of Michel Houellebecq - one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time - is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was...

The most important critical work for decades' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times In the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the...

The author of "The Barracks Thief" and "Hunters in the Snow" recreates his boyhood experiences, relating how he and his mother travelled throughout the United States, and tracing his experiences and changes from young boy to manhood against the...

'A joy of a book - enriching, illuminating, eclectic and far from a conventional science read' Richard Webb, New Scientist Books of the Year'Carlo Rovelli's imaginative rigour, his lively humour and his beautiful writing are inspiring' Erica WagnerOne of...

Here is the distinctly surreal world of Henry King, who perished through his 'chief defect' of chewing little bits of string; of dishonest Matilda whose dreadful lies led her to death by burning; and of Godolphin Horne who 'held the human race in scorn'...

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the...

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story-the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King-that...

It was with this play that Harold Pinter had his first major success, and its production history since it was first performed in 1960 has established the work as a landmark in twentieth-century drama.The obsessive caretaker, Davies, whose papers are in...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The New York Edition of the novel, accompanied by Michael Gorra's introduction and explanatory footnotes. Background and contextual materials centering on James as a writer, The Portrait of a Lady in revision,...

'A landmark, bringing together a lifetime's work on Lewis Carroll by writer and mathematician Martin Gardner. He dazzles on Carroll's puzzles and games of logic and entertains on everything from Alice's influence on the Beat poet Jack Kerouac to...

Plutarch of Chaeronea is one of the most influential and fascinating authors of antiquity. His Parallel Lives and Moralia are storehouses of challenging questions, valuable insights and interesting observations. Moreover, they contain a wealth of...

A bold new account of how celebrity worksWhy do we care so much about celebrities? Who decides who gets to be a star? Do celebrities deserve the outsized attention they receive? Sharon Marcus challenges everything you thought you knew about our obsession...

Literary theory has now become integral to how we produce literary criticism. When critics write about a text, they no longer think just about the biographical or historical contexts of the work, but also about the different approaches that literary...

Page to Stage series - highly accessible guides to the world's best-known plays, written by established theatre professionals to show how the plays come to life on the stage. 'Modern classic' was the fitting accolade bestowed on Timberlake...

A leading historian argues that in the empire we know as Byzantium, the Greek-speaking population was actually Roman, and scholars have deliberately mislabeled their ethnicity for the past two centuries for political reasons.Was there ever such a thing...

This Arden edition of Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, presents an authoritative, modernized text based on the Second Quarto text with a new introductory essay covering key productions and criticism in the decade since its first...

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FENTONSubtitled 'An education in the twenties', this work blends autobiography and fiction to describe the inner life of a writer evolving from precocious public school boy to Cambridge drop-out at large in London's...

Easy to use in the classroom or as a tool for revision, Oxford Literature Companions provide student-friendly analysis of a range of popular A Level set texts. Each book offers a lively, engaging approach to the text, covering characterisation and role,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590171844Author John GlasscoFormat PaperbackPage Count 296Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

One of the most remarkable novels every written by an American woman about women. First published in 1943, the story follows a womanAIs flight from Manhattan and her unfaithful husband to her rural ancestral home. Southern Classics Series.About the...