Literary Criticism

This Reader's Guide analyses the critical history of two of Hardy's major tragic novels, from the time of their publication to the present. Simon Avery traces the changing critical fortunes of the texts and explores the diverse range of interpretations...

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...

Wordsworth was an eighteenth-century contemporary of Blake and his greatest poetry was composed before Keats had written a line. His impact, however, was not fully registered until the Victorian period, when it became common to place his poetry in the...

The Revenger's Tragedy is one of the most vital, important, and enduring tragedies of the Jacobean era, one of the few non-Shakespearean plays of that period that is still regularly revived on stage and taught in classrooms. The play is notable for its...

Charles Altieri, one of our foremost analysts of modernism, has in his recent work argued for the importance of the affects, which philosophy has too long subordinated to cognition and ethics. In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity, Altieri...

Celebrated as a novelist and made famous by her novel Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942) is far less known for also writing and publishing hundreds of poems over a period of half a century.Although this output included a...

In Market a la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which...

Anna Seward and her career defy easy placement into the traditional periods of British literature. Raised to emulate the great poets John Milton and Alexander Pope, maturing in the Age of Sensibility, and publishing during the early Romantic era, Seward...

Elegant and learned, personal and universal, literary, philosophical, and historical-Hillel Halkin's finely wrought essays on themes of Jewish culture and life are an education in themselves.Hillel Halkin is widely admired for his works of literary...

"The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism" discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines...

Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Studies! Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic books Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black...

"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see. That-and no more, and it is every-thing." So wrote Joseph Conrad in the best-known account of literary...

Wild Visionary reconsiders Maurice Sendak's life and work in the context of his experience as a Jewish gay man. Maurice (Moishe) Bernard Sendak (1928-2012) was a fierce, romantic, and shockingly funny truth seeker who intervened in modern literature and...

This collection of 12 new essays brings together prominent literary experts to explore the importance of Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks, both his mainstream and science fiction work. It considers Banks as a habitual border crosser who makes things...

Originally published in 1995. In three parts - introduction, criticism and reviews - this volume examines the goriest of Shakespeare's works. The editor's exhaustive introduction runs through the pattern of changing scholarship and commentary,...

This book aims to provide an analytical study of the sources, the art and the presentation of oral, or spoken, poetry. Paul Zumthor, a literary theorist, discusses the development of oral poetry from antiquity to the present in all its aspects: the forms...

In recent years, the idea of multiculturalism has become a powerful-and controversial-influence in a variety of social and cultural territories. In the academic world it has profoundly influenced curriculum and scholarship in the humanities, particularly...

This Norton Critical Edition of The Blithedale Romance is based on the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, widely considered the best available edition. It is accompanied by explanatory annotations to help readers with Hawthorne's many...

The entertaining story of four utopian writers-Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman-and their continuing influence todayFor readers reared on the dystopian visions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale,...

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who,...

The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift is a specially commissioned collection of essays. Arranged thematically across a range of topics, this 2003 volume will deepen and extend the enjoyment and understanding of Jonathan Swift for students and...

This Norton Critical Edition of The Conjure Stories arranges the tales chronologically by composition date, allowing readers to discern how Chesnutt experimented with plots and characters and with the idea of the conjure story over time. With one...

Working from the Bible to contemporary art, Shibboleth surveys the linguistic performances behind the politics of border crossings and the policing of identities. In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members...

Assessing the impact of fin-de-siecle Jewish culture on subsequent developments in literature and culture, this book is the first to consider the historical trajectory of Austrian-Jewish writing across the 20th century. It examines how Vienna, the city...

Our relationship with trees is a lengthy, complex one. Since we first walked the earth we have, at various times, worshiped them, felled them and even talked to them. For many of us, though, our first memories of interacting with trees will be of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788763543958Author George HingeFormat PaperbackPage Count 366Imprint Museum Tusculanum PressPublisher Museum Tusculanum PressWeight(grams)...

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead. Tracing their representational afterlife across a massive array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861...

Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy and political theory,...

A transformative literary history of black environmental writing.Winner, William Sanders Scarborough Prize by the Modern Language AssociationAt the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of Black literary response...

Devoted to the ways in which Holocaust literature and Gulag literature provide contexts for each other, Leona Toker's book shows how the prominent features of one shed light on the veiled features and methods of the other. Toker views these narratives...

This is a much-needed textbook for students of epigraphy and an up-to-date reference work for scholars. Central to the work are its photos. Professor Gordon presents 100 Latin inscriptions arranged in chronological order and illustrated by the best...

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they...

This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson's complete oeuvre, offering detailed analysis of her nine novels as well as addressing her non-fiction and minor fictional work. Susana Onega combines the study of formal issues such as narrative...

A new source for Shakespeare's plays, only recently uncovered, is investigated here with a full edition and facsimile of the text. New sources for Shakespeare do not turn up every day... This is a truly significant one that has not heretofore been...

Transgender and the Literary Imagination is the first full length study to revisit twentieth century narratives and their afterlives, examining the extent to which they have reflected, shaped or transformed changing understandings of gender.Book...

Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates...

The first study to utilize the Klagenfurt Edition of Musil's Nachlass offers a close reading of textual variations, emphasizing Musil's commitment to the artist's role in re-creating the world. Robert Musil, known to be a scientific and philosophical...

Paul Ricoeur's contribution to the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics, is considerable: he ranks among the masters of this discipline alongside Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. In addition to major works like The Conflict of...

Now available in paperback, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory is an up-to-date guide to contemporary debates in postcolonial studies and how these shape our understanding of Shakespeare's politics and poetics. Taking a historical perspective, it covers...

Translation (and text) of colloquies gives vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon monastic education. The monk Aelfric Bata is the only identifiable graduate of the school of Aelfric `Grammaticus', the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon homilist whose Grammar, Glossary...